Introducing Hibernate

Hibernate is a full-featured, open source OR mapping framework for the Java platform. In many ways Hibernate is similar to EJB CMP CMR (container-managed-persistence/container-managed-relationships), and JDO (Java Data Objects). Unlike JDO, Hibernate focuses entirely on OR mapping for relational databases, and includes more features than most commercial products. Most EJB CMP CMR solutions use code generation to implement persistence code, while JDO uses bytecode decoration. Conversely, Hibernate uses reflection and runtime bytecode generation, making it nearly transparent to end users. (Earlier implementations of Hibernate used reflection only, which aids in debugging, and current versions retain this option.)       

Porting Hibernate-based apps

If your application must run on many RDBMS systems, Hibernate-based applications port almost effortlessly from IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase, Oracle, HypersonicSQL, and many more. I even recently worked on an application port from MySQL to Firebird, which isn't all that well supported by Hibernate, and the port was effortless. See Resources for a case study of a switch between Postgres and MySQL.

Hibernate allows you to model inheritance (several ways); association (one-to-one or one-to-many, containment, and aggregation); and composition. I'll cover several examples of each type of relationship in this article.

Hibernate provides a query language called Hibernate Query Language (HQL), which is similar to JDO's JDOQL and EJB's EJB QL; although it is closer to the former. But Hibernate doesn't stop there: it also allows you to perform direct SQL queries and/or use object criteria to compose criteria easily at runtime. I'll use only HQL in the examples for this article.

Unlike EJB CMP CMR and like JDO, Hibernate can work inside of or outside of a J2EE container, which is a boon for those of us doing TDD and agile development.