1.2. Part 1 - The first Hibernate Application
First, we'll create a simple console-based Hibernate application. We use an Java database (HSQL DB), so we do not have to install any database server.
Let's assume we need a small database application that can store events we want to attend, and information about the hosts of these events.
The first thing we do, is set up our development directory and put all the Java libraries we need into it. Download the Hibernate distribution from the Hibernate website. Extract the package and place all required libraries found in /lib
into into the /lib
directory of your new development working directory. It should look like this:
.
+lib
antlr.jar
cglib.jar
asm.jar
asm-attrs.jars
commons-collections.jar
commons-logging.jar
hibernate3.jar
jta.jar
dom4j.jar
log4j.jar
This is the minimum set of required libraries (note that we also copied hibernate3.jar, the main archive) for Hibernate
at the time of writing
. The Hibernate release you are using might require more or less libraries. See the README.txt
file in the lib/
directory of the Hibernate distribution for more information about required and optional third-party libraries. (Actually, Log4j is not required but preferred by many developers.)
Next we create a class that represents the event we want to store in database.
Our first persistent class is a simple JavaBean class with some properties:
package events;
import java.util.Date;
public class Event {
private Long id;
private String title;
private Date date;
public Event() {}
public Long getId() {
return id;
}
private void setId(Long id) {
this.id = id;
}
public Date getDate() {
return date;
}
public void setDate(Date date) {
this.date = date;
}
public String getTitle() {
return title;
}
public void setTitle(String title) {
this.title = title;
}
}
You can see that this class uses standard JavaBean naming conventions for property getter and setter methods, as well as private visibility for the fields. This is a recommended design - but not required. Hibernate can also access fields directly, the benefit of accessor methods is robustness for refactoring. The no-argument constructor is required to instantiate an object of this class through reflection.
The id
property holds a unique identifier value for a particular event. All persistent entity classes (there are less important dependent classes as well) will need such an identifier property if we want to use the full feature set of Hibernate. In fact, most applications (esp. web applications) need to distinguish objects by identifier, so you should consider this a feature rather than a limitation. However, we usually don't manipulate the identity of an object, hence the setter method should be private. Only Hibernate will assign identifiers when an object is saved. You can see that Hibernate can access public, private, and protected accessor methods, as well as (public, private, protected) fields directly. The choice is up to you and you can match it to fit your application design.
The no-argument constructor is a requirement for all persistent classes; Hibernate has to create objects for you, using Java Reflection. The constructor can be private, however, package visibility is required for runtime proxy generation and efficient data retrieval without bytecode instrumentation.
Place this Java source file in a directory called src
in the development folder, and in its correct package. The directory should now look like this:
.
+lib
<Hibernate and third-party libraries>
+src
+events
Event.java
In the next step, we tell Hibernate about this persistent class.