Harnessing Hibernate [Paperback]

James Elliott PH.D. (Author), Timothy M. O'Brien (Author), Ryan Fowler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0596517726 | ISBN-13: 978-0596517724 | Edition: 1

Harnessing Hibernate is an ideal introduction to the popular framework that lets Java developers work with information from a relational database easily and efficiently. Databases are a very different world than Java objects, and they often involve people with different skills and specializations. With Hibernate, bridging these two worlds is significantly easier, and with this book, you can get up to speed with Hibernate quickly.

Rather than present you with another reference, Harnessing Hibernate lets you explore the system, from download and configuration through a series of projects that demonstrate how to accomplish a variety of practical goals. The new edition of this concise guide walks you through Hibernate's primary features, which include mapping from Java classes to database tables, and from Java data types to SQL data types. You will also learn about Hibernate's data query and retrieval facilities, and much more.

By reading and following along with the examples, you can get your own Hibernate environment set up quickly and start using it for real-world tasks right away. Harnessing Hibernate teaches you 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

Once you're past the first few chapters, you can jump to topics that you find particularly interesting or relevant. All background material and explanations of how Hibernate works and why is in the service of a focused task. Source code can be downloaded from the book's website.

If using SQL is an uncomfortable chore, Harnessing Hibernate offers you an effective and trouble-free method for working with the information you store in your applications.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Elliott is a senior software engineer at Berbee, with fifteen years' professional experience as a systems developer. He started designing with objects well before work environments made it convenient, and has a passion for building high-quality Java tools and frameworks to simplify the tasks of other developers.

Tim is a professional singer/programmer living and working in the Chicago area. He prefers Emacs to vi. Tim discovered programming on a TRS-80, and went on to study (and subsequently forget) Electrical Engineering at UVA. In his free time Tim likes to sleep, study music, build toys with microcontrollers, and participate in open source projects. Tim is active in the Jakarta Commons.

Ryan Fowler is a software engineer at Berbee in Madison, WI. He programmed Basic on Apple II machines for a while in elementary school at St. Stephen School in Grand Rapids, MI. He returned to coding in the computer science department at Alma College in Alma, MI while earning his bachelor's degree. Ryan skis, sails and rounds life out with some guitar playing when there's no snow or wind.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596517726
• ISBN-13: 978-0596517724
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #532,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Relational Databases

More About the Author

i'm a writer and a programmer, I live in Evanston, IL, and I generally work on web sites and digital media projects.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Expected more, January 11, 2009

By 

Charlie - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harnessing Hibernate (Paperback)

The chapter about eclipse and hibernate was somewhat useful, the rest was some sort of tedious tribute to ant, maven and open software in general. The main argument seems to avoid 'complex joins', why would you work with databases at all if you think joins between two tables is rocket science? What will you do if hibernate fails and you don't understand whats going on beneath? How can you design a good database if you find these things to complex?

I bought the book to learn HIBERNATE, not ant, not maven etc. The examples are poor, i.e it shows how to do a one-to-many relationship, what about other relationships?

To me, the hibernate documentation was much more useful, seriously.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beginner's Hibernate, October 5, 2008

By 

Eric Jain (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harnessing Hibernate (Paperback)

Nice step-by-step guide for building a web application that makes use of Hibernate. This fills in an important gap left by the official Hibernate documentation. However, a consequence of this approach is that much of the book ends up being devoted to explaining how to set up the chosen tools and frameworks (see table of contents). If you are instead looking for more in-depth information on topics such as session and object lifecycles, complicated mappings or performance, you'll find more information in the official Hibernate documentation (or in the corresponding section in the Spring documentation). This book really ought to have a less cute, but more descriptive title.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not enough Hibernate Detail - Poor Book, January 7, 2009

By 

K. Langer "Java Lover" (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Harnessing Hibernate (Paperback)

I ordered and read this book. Overall, I was able to get information from it but it was not complete enough. I ended up finding more answers from the internet and from "Beginning Hibernate" (Apress). The Apress book was ordered recently and is really meant for developers. It has a lot of clear examples and work around approaches for odd HQL things (i.e. use Views if you have HQL aggregate issues).

Where the Programming Hibernate lost me (my interest that is) was the extensive discussion about Maven. Who cares about Maven. It is a good build system but Maven is _not_ required to use Hibernate. Why discuss it? This book and the Apress books were about the same length (in pages) so much of the O'Reilly book was wasted talking about Maven when Hibernate (the purpose of the book) should have been discussed. Plus, it adds complexity if you need Maven to do the examples.

If you are getting into Hibernate, check out the Apress book first. Then look at this book.