==> What is Hibernate

Hibernate is a free, open source Java package that makes it easy to work with most of the available relational databases.Hibernate makes it seem as if the database contains simple Java objects, without having to worry about how to retrieve the data from (or save it back into) database tables.

Most of the applications need to interact with database.Data will be stored in no of interconnected objects when the application is running. But all those objects will be vanished when the program ends.So there is a need to store that data before those objects get vanished. Moreover, the task of loading the huge amounts of data from the database into the interconnected objects is tedious and error prone, and represents major portion effort involved. So many programmers worked on automating this process to reduce the effort of application developers. Finally they are succeded in developing some object / relational mapping tools.

Hibernate is one among the object / relational mapping tools developed which gives so much of flexibility to the application developers.

Hibernate gives the pesistence ability to the objects.All that is required to use Hibernate in the application is creating an XML mapping document which says what classes need to be stored in the database and how the class relate to the tables and columns in the database. That can do the magic of fetching the data into objects and storing the data into the database.

Hibernate has an inbuilt API to query the objects represented by the database. To update the database, simply modify those objects and ask hibernate to save the changes. To create a new reacords in database, simply create an object and ask hibernate to save. Hibernate saves back the data into the database.

The Hibernate API is simple to learn and interacts quite naturally with the flow of the program. Hibernate is database independent. When hibernate is being used in the application, the application can be interacted with any kind of database.

The HTML version of Hibernate tutorial can be found at

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html/

The PDF version of Hibernate tutorial can be downloaded from

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/pdf/hibernate_reference.pdf