Part I. Hibernate in a Hurry
Our first goal is to get up to speed with Hibernate as quickly as possible. Most of the chapters in this part are updated versions of content from Hibernate: A Developer’s Notebook (O’Reilly), reflecting the major changes that came about with Hibernate 3. The sample code now works with the latest versions of the tools we rely on to provide an easy yet realistic environment for working with Hibernate. There is also a new chapter covering the ability to use Java 5 annotations, rather than XML mapping files, to configure Hibernate mappings.
Note
Of course, with any printed book about active open source projects, things will get out of date quickly! See Appendix E for the specific versions we discuss, and for ideas on how to cope with changes.
Getting started and following along with the examples is even easier in this new version of the book because we’ve adopted Maven to help download many of the tools and libraries. As we hope you will see, there’s no excuse to avoid diving in and trying this stuff yourself!
Once you’re comfortable with the fundamentals of Hibernate, Part II will demonstrate how to tie Hibernate into some other environments to make each more powerful than they are on their own.
All right, time to dive in….