Professional Hibernate

Many software books present a padded version of the homesite reference manual, perhaps larded with computer-science boilerplate, industry war stories, and the software-manual version of standup comedy. Not so this. Hibernate is a popular Object/Relational Mapping tool, aimed at rationalizing the interaction of databases and application programs. "Professional Hibernate" offers an excellent introduction to the topic, featuring plenty of diagrams and short, pertinent code samples. The pace is right, and the book makes me believe that the authors have actually used Hibernate for application development. Extensive treatment is given to the relationship of Hibernate to other major Open-Source tools, notably Xdoclet, Maven and Eclipse ( there are lots of others). Owing to the enormous flux in this area, the chapter on Eclipse has gotten a bit out of date in the year since it was written, as Hibernate Synchronizer is apparently winning out over Hibernator in the marketplace of downloads. It is interesting to compare this book to "Hibernate -- A Developer's Notebook" by James Elliott. Both books are well organized, well written, and stick to the point. Elliott's book is smaller and costs half as much. Pugh and Gradecki offer a bit more on the interaction of Hibernate to other packages. To inject a personal opinion, I'm not comfortable with the Object/Relational Model. The gist of it seems to be: the database is a place for objects to rest when idle. My own experience suggests otherwise: the natural relationship between classes and tables is complicated, and admits no bijection the two. While HQL supports joins, it seems that Hibernate is principally geared for single-table queries, which are too simple to support nontrivial business logic. So, while Hibernate is generally thought to save work in JDBC applications, I doubt ORM hits the mark.

This is a well written and illustrated book that guides you through the entire Hibernate O/R mapping landscape. The chapters are short. The text is fairly terse. And the author relies heavily on code to do the talking. It's fine if you like learning that way. For those who want a gentler approach I would recommend Manning's Hibernate in Action.

This book covers the basics really well, but it is no replacement for the docs. However it complements the docs very nicely with a totally fresh perspective on developing with Hibernate. The docs contain clear and concise directions for using Hibernate in its most common configurations. This book also covers the basics of Hibernate, but from the perspective of building working applications. The authors demonstrate how to build at least three applications in this book, and each one makes use of a different set of Hibernate features and functions. The code itself is not commented, but the surrounding text does an excellent job of explaining it, and all the code worked for me with little effort. The code supports many different databases (mysql, postgresql, and db2, etc). The other aspect of the book's perspective that I appreciated is its focus on using Hibernate with other tools. The authors have obviously done a lot of Hibernate development in production situations. They explain how to integrate Hibernate with tomcat, xdoclet, maven, eclipse, and other common tools. They also discuss more esoteric tools (at least from my perspective) including design patterns and AspectJ. This book did a lot to move me from playing with Hibernate to using it in my development work.