This chapter demonstrated the basic steps for preparing to use Hibernate. The first step is to install and run a database engine. HSQLDB is a simple, lightweight, and easy-to-use open-source database. Therefore, it lets us learn Hibernate without getting involved in database details.
After setting up a database, the next steps are getting Hibernate and setting up the project hierarchy. Although there are some templates for the application structure, this structure mostly depends on the application you are working on.
Getting Ant or Maven and adding them to the project are the next steps. Ant is a utility project that provides an automatic build process. To start using Ant, extract Ant in a directory, set up the ANT_HOME variable in your system properties, add its bin subdirectory to the System PATH, and create and set up a build file. Maven is another project which is used to build the project and manage project dependencies. Like Ant, to use Maven, you need to set up the MAVEN_HOME...