| Hibernate is a solid, productive Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool
that lets developers think and work with objects rather than tables and
columns. It has grown over the years, been used by many developers, and
has gone through three major versions. This book’s goal is to make you
productive with Hibernate.
Hibernate Quickly is a gradual introduction to the features of Hibernate,
covering the latest version, Hibernate 3. Each chapter introduces a series
of concepts that form a foundation for the next chapter, but should illustrate
those concepts completely. We set out to write the book we would
have liked to have when we first learned Hibernate. We both think that
studying good code examples is one of the best ways to learn, so we
included as many as we could. We also wanted to make our own reference,
a book we could have on our desk and turn to when we forgot just
how that one mapping needed to be written.
Developers don’t work with Hibernate in a vacuum. In addition to standard
Java, developers often use Hibernate with a host of other third-party
(often open source) tools and libraries, including J2EE (web applications);
build tools like Ant; unit-testing frameworks like JUnit; and frameworks
like XDoclet, Struts, WebWork, Tapestry, and Spring. This book
shows how Hibernate fits into your development projects by demonstrating
how these third party tools can be integrated with Hibernate. Because
this book is about Hibernate, and we didn’t want it to be 1,000 pages long
or weigh as much as a battleship, we assume that developers are partially
familiar with the third-party libraries with which they want to integrate
Hibernate. We provide some introduction, so you should be able to follow
along if you’ve used, say, Tapestry; but you should consult Manning’s
In Action series for more details about those tools. |
