Book Image

Mastering Hibernate

Book Image

Mastering Hibernate

Overview of this book

Hibernate has been so successful since its inception that it even influenced the Java Enterprise Edition specification in that the Java Persistence API was dramatically changed to do it the Hibernate way. Hibernate is the tool that solves the complex problem of Object Relational Mapping. It can be used in both Java Enterprise applications as well as .Net applications. Additionally, it can be used for both SQL and NoSQL data stores. Some developers learn the basics of Hibernate and hit the ground quickly. But when demands go beyond the basics, they take a reactive approach instead of learning the fundamentals and core concepts. However, the secret to success for any good developer is knowing and understanding the tools at your disposal. It’s time to learn about your tool to use it better This book first explores the internals of Hibernate by discussing what occurs inside a Hibernate session and how Entities are managed. Then, we cover core topics such as mapping, querying, caching, and we demonstrate how to use a wide range of very useful annotations. Additionally, you will learn how to create event listeners or interceptors utilizing the improved architecture in the latest version of Hibernate.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Legacy application


If you are working with a legacy application, there are a few considerations to keep in mind, such as reverse engineering and modernization. Let's discuss those here.

Reverse engineering

There are times that you just want to migrate your data access from another technology—such as raw JDBC, Spring JdbcTemplate, or MyBatis to Hibernate.

The JBoss team offers a very nice eclipse plugin that provides very useful functionalities, such as model viewer, mapping diagram HQL editor, and reverse engineering. Using this feature, you can extract enough information from the database (using the appropriate database dialect) to generate Hibernate mapping files, Java classes, annotations, and more. We will not discuss the steps for reverse engineering an existing database, as clear instructions are available online. For further information, visit http://tools.jboss.org/features/hibernate.html.

We would like to share a few useful hints to help you create better maps when reverse engineering...