Java Persistence with Hibernate

6.4. Mapping a parent/children relationship

From our experience with the Hibernate user community, we know that the first thing many developers try to do when they begin using Hibernate is a mapping of a parent/children relationship. This is usually the first time you encounter collections. It's also the first time you have to think about the differences between entities and value types, or get lost in the complexity of ORM.

Managing the associations between classes and the relationships between tables is at the heart of ORM. Most of the difficult problems involved in implementing an ORM solution relate to association management.

You mapped relationships between classes of value type in the previous section and earlier in the book, with varying ...