Harnessing Hibernate--New from O’Reilly: A Step-by-Step Guide to Java Persistence

Sebastopol, CA—Java and databases make a powerful combination. Getting the two sides to work together, however, takes some effort. For many Java developers, it’s the least pleasant part of their work. Even database experts, who may enjoy fiddling with SQL, dread the tedious plumbing and typographical spaghetti needed to put their SQL into a Java program. It comes down to the plain fact that Java deals in objects while most databases do not. In the ongoing effort to automate the task, the Hibernate persistence framework has emerged as a powerful contender: programmers write natural Java objects and some simple configuration files, and Hibernate automates all the interactions between the objects and the database. Harnessing Hibernate (O’Reilly, US $39.99) by James Elliott, Tim O’Brien, and Ryan Fowler introduces readers to this popular framework.

Elliott, who authored this book’s predecessor, Hibernate: A Developer’s Notebook (O’Reilly, 2005), notes that Hibernate has changed tremendously since his earlier book was published: “I continue to get email from readers asking for help on adapting the book’s detailed code examples so they work with today’s Hibernate. To help deal with that, I wrote an updated ”Getting Started with Hibernate 3“ pdf, but people still want to learn more about Hibernate, so we realized we needed to update and expand the whole Notebook, which also gave me the opportunity to ask Ryan and Tim to contribute chapters on working with interesting related technologies.”

More than a reference, Harnessing Hibernate starts with basic configuration before moving on to demonstrate how to use Hibernate to accomplish practical goals. “If you follow along with the examples--which is easy--you’ll have a working Hibernate-based program early in the book and an understanding of how you got there, and how you can change things to solve your own problems,” says Elliott.

“I wanted to give people a solid starting point for learning Hibernate that reflects what it’s grown into, and add more information about a handful of other projects--like Spring--which dovetail with Hibernate,” says Elliott. “We also adopted the Maven Ant tasks so that readers can easily work with the particular tool versions tested in the examples, which will help avoid the little inconsistencies that accumulate over time whenever you write about a thriving open source community.”

This book covers Hibernate’s primary features, such as mapping from Java classes to database tables and from Java data types to SQL data types, as well as Hibernate’s data query and retrieval facilities. Harnessing Hibernate also shows how to:

Perform object/relational mapping
Work with persistent data from Java code
Work with groups and relationships between objects
Extend Hibernate’s rich type support for your own needs
Simplify query creation using criteria and examples
Use the Hibernate Query Language (HQL) and understand how it differs from SQL
Use Hibernate in conjunction with Spring
Use Hibernate in conjunction with other packages, such as the Stripes web framework and the Eclipse IDE

If you find using SQL to be a chore, Harnessing Hibernate offers you an effective and painless method for working with the information you store in your applications.