Chapter 1, Setting Up Hibernate, provides the basics of hibernate and the persistent class. Next, you will learn to obtain the required libraries, XML and annotation-based configuration, and the mapping required for hibernate.

Chapter 2, Understanding the Fundamentals, takes you through the basic objects required to start working with hibernate, such as SessionFactory, Session, Criteria, Projection, and so on.

Chapter 3, Basic Annotations, covers the very basic annotations that are useful and necessary while writing with hibernate, such as declaring table (@Table), declaring column (@Column), declaring primary key (@Id), and so on.

Chapter 4, Working with Collections, explains how collections work with hibernate and how to persist Java collections such as List, Map, Set, and so on using hibernate.

Chapter 5, Working With Associations, helps you to understand relationships and associations such as one-to-one, one-to-many (many-to-one), and many-to-many. In this chapter, you will discover the simplest way to implement a relationship using hibernate.

Chapter 6, Querying, applies the basics of hibernate to query a database. This chapter helps you to understand the fundamentals of hibernate such as alias, subquery, NamedQuery, formula, and HQL.

Chapter 7, Advanced Concepts, helps you to learn the advanced concepts in hibernate such as caching, inheritance strategy, versioning, and maintaining the history of the objects.

Chapter 8, Integration with Other Frameworks, explains integration with other MVC frameworks such as Struts and Spring. It shows how to achieve a persistent life cycle in the frameworks.

Knowledge of the Java programming language is a must. Also, you are expected to have an understanding of the relational database, SQL query, and JDBC API. The knowledge of IDEs such as Eclipse or NetBeans is preferred.

You will need the following software/tools:

This is book for the Java developers who now want to learn hibernate. A good knowledge and understanding of Java is preferred to allow an efficient programming of the core elements and applications. It would also be helpful if the readers are familiar with the basics of SQL.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "dialect helps hibernate to generate database specific SQL statements."

A block of code is set as follows:

<hibernate-mapping>
  <class="Employee" table="employee">
    <id name="id" type="long" column="id">
      <generator class="increment" />
    </id>
    <property column="firstName" name="firstName" />
    <property column="salary" name="salary" />
  </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

@AuditTable(value="emp_history")
public class Employee {
  // other fields and setters/getters
}

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