Customer Reviews

Harnessing Hibernate

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I am totally new to hibernate, and I was hoping for a book that would serve as a comprehensive guide to hibernate. I was rather disappointed. The book constantly says: you can do this really neato thing, but it's beyond the scope of this book. The chapter on HQL was very brief indeed really only scratching the surface, which was a bit surprising as it would seem to me that using HQL would be a very common task which would benefit from in depth coverage. The chapter on annotations was also a bit light as this seems to be the new preferred way to use hibernate amongst developers today.

Despite these grumbles with the book, I found it a helpful and clear introduction to hibernate that did at least give me an overview in a clear and concise manner. The coverage of features in hibernate 3 was good too, as other books have become a bit dated. The later chapters on how to integrate hibernate with other tools are very useful, and I found the inclusion of stripes particularly poignant. It's a good book, but not great if what you want is an in depth understanding of hibernate.

Harnessing Hibernate is a fine book, which uses the most efficient ways to achieve its goal. Though focusing on Hibernate, the book enlists the usage of various frameworks such as Spring Framework, Stripes and Maven.


Part I: Hibernate in a hurry: The core

Build:
The book starts with how you should build which used to be a dread. The authors choose to use Ant - Maven task, which is cool. I use Maven directly, but that's beside the point. Both approaches are better than finding the JARs on the web.

Database:
HSQLDB is what the book recommends and for some reason it makes sense </sarcasm>. It really is the best way to go. I am not suggesting to format your Oracle DB server and install HSQLDB; but I am suggesting you stay focused and worry about the big DB later; the book goes back to a larger DB; so don't worry too much right now.

The Project Hierarchy:
This one, I must admit, I do not care for; I think Maven directory structure is better and one should not have to create this manually, but that's probably personal. This is later reviewed in Chapter 12: Maven in More Depth.

Core hibernate:
The book doesn't mess around too much. It explains how to configure hibernate and before long you find your hands in hibernate mapping. From chapter 2 through chapter 9 you'll find yourself in the core of Hibernate: mapping, hibernate configuration, persistent objects (creating and finding), collections and associations, richer associations, custom value types, annotations, criteria queries and a look at HQL.

Part II: Playing nice with others: beyond the core

MySQL - a nice short intro to MySQL is shown.

Hibernate and Eclipse - yes, this is in here too (and up to date Eclipse v3.3). And just in time for you to get ready for a later chapter, Spring and Hibernate, which is the way J2EE is going anyway (lightweight).

Maven in more depth - Maven does not have many books out there and this is a very nice in depth explanation. If you think you've gotten short changed, take a look at Java Power Tools (you'll love that book too). The chapter is enough to get you moving with Maven, and if your Maven experience is anything like mine, you'll never go back to Ant.

Hibernate and Spring - this book could not have gotten any better than this. Spring, is like a dream. Rod Johnson, Colin Sampaleanu and team have done it well. Unlike the other monolithic approach, Spring takes advantage of already existing frameworks and offers this invisible layer to allow you to focus on what's important; your business code... and, of course, the book delivers. It shows you how Spring simplifies Hibernate development. If you're new to layered development a la separation of concerns (SoC) the book first introduces you to the DAO pattern. It then continues with the reason so many of us like the Spring framework: HibernateDAOSupport and the HibernateTemplate. Although I prefer to use the HibernateTemplate directly and avoid loosing my one chance at inheritance, I agree with the book examples. The authors are tying to help you understand what kind of support Spring offers.

Stripes with Spring and Hibernate - Now, the book could just end here and be done with it, but no, it continues with the web app. I mean, wow. The book ends with style. It uses Tomcat - and I think it does it to prove a point. You don't need a fancy big server to get J2EE running these days. Stripes is a cool project to work with and I thank the authors for introducing me to a framework I was clueless about.

This book is truly amazing. If you're looking for an in-depth approach to Hibernate take a look at Java Persistence with Hibernate. If, however, you're an impatient developer this is the book for you. I think it offers just enough in-depth theory and it keeps you awake with frequent easy to understand code.

James Elliott, Timothy M. O'Brien and Ryan Fowler; I thank you all for writing this book.

/.Will

This is a very poor book. I am returning it.
This book is a mere overview of Hibernate. It should focus on fundamental concepts like the session, dealing with versions, or managing transactions, instead, it deals with technologies that have nothing to do with Hibernate like Maven for the second half of the book. Very disappointing.
The book on Hibernate from Gavin King is definitely much better, for a beginner as well as a more advanced developer.

If you're totally new to the subject of Hibernate, this book will set you on your way.

However, if you're familiar with the basics already and are looking for a structured way to become proficient in Hibernate, the book will probably disappoint you. It deals with only the simpler things in Hibernate and leaves everything outside of the simple examples to the "hibernate reference documentation".

Interesting chapters about eclipse and hibernate tools and a brief introduction into Spring support for Hibernate, but overall it left me wondering: was that all ?

Again, it's a good book and easy to read if you are looking for a place to start. But in the end you will have to buy another book to pick you up where Harnessing Hibernate left you off (a bit more knowledgeable and eager to learn than you were before reading HH, I'll give it that much).

The amount of useful information in the book is much shorter than the book itself. The examples and bullet point explanations are good and is where you will get most of the value from the book. Those can easily fit into a book a quarter of the size. The rest are just useless asides that get in the way. For example, the author(s) try to crack jokes about rich friends in the chapter about relations (get it, friends and relations? Not funny and useless). The book would have been more valuable if it was condensed and better organized. Furthermore, this book doesn't talk nearly in depth enough about Hibernate. It wastes almost half of the pages on non-Hibernate related information such as Maven and Spring. If your project deviates even slightly from the prescribed path, you'll be lost because the book doesn't give you enough of a foundation to find your own way.

If you really want to learn Hibernate, get the Gavin King book. King is one of the founders of the Hibernate project and his book reflects his depth of knowledge.

I'm half way and very pleasantly surprised. I like to type stuff in manually to get it to 'stick' and I plainly can't believe that I haven't found one error in the code listings!!! I'm a pro developer, so I don't usually bicker too much about this, but it surely is a time saver when the examples are correct. That said, the author combines a lot of the code so that it probably loses cohesion, but I'm 100% sure that this is in fact by design. For pedantic purposes it's easier -- I'm happy, about this, because I'm just trying to get up to speed on Hibernate, not get a design patterns lesson. I'm sure he's leading to that (again, I've only read half the book).

For those that gave the book a lower rating, I have to pretty much agree with their comments, but I think they're being a bit unfair. This book isn't trying to be the most 'complete' reference IMO, but rather, get you going. That said, it does WAY more as another positive reviewer mentions...you get to play with Spring, Maven, and a bunch of other goodies. Very happy with this book so far!

This book is a concise practicum on a simple Hibernate project using readily available documentation. OTOH, Bauer & King's excellent treatise "Java Persistence with Hibernate" is extremely thorough and complex, but perhaps too cumbersome for some Hibernoobs.

The Harnessing example project is a jump start for putting the concepts together, esp with the new Eclipse tools. I can return to Bauer & King for more in-depth theoretical study later.

UPDATE: After studying the Hibernate contents of this book, I agree with other critiques that say it's quite simplistic. But, I still maintain that it's a good practicum on a simple Hibernate project, to be read along with more expansive coverage in the Bauer Bible.

Also, rather lightly covering the relatively obscure Stripes MVC, I'd have preferred something on Springs WebFlow.