Hibernate - 1

Starting with s articles on Hibernate dealing with What/Why and How

1. What is Hibernate ?
Hibernate is an object relational mapping tool for Java Applications. Instead of writing sql code in java, the developer can use Hibernate to persist and retrieve POJOs to the database.

A POJO maps to a database table.On the java side the developer deals with the POJO and populates its instance with data.Its the job of Hibernate to persist the state of this POJO to the database.Basically behind the scene one row of the database is mapped to one instance of the POJO.

2. Why use Hibernate ?

* Its one of the best ORMS available.

* JDBC gets out of hand if the number of screens is very large.

* If the development team is not well aquainted with SQL then using Hibernate will solve that
problem as it optimizes the query before firing them to the database.

* Simple to use only one configuration file

* Supports many databases

* Supports Caching. Can be integrated with many opensource and commercial caches so that
the POJO's can be caches with the data readily available from cache.

* Support Lazy loading i.e to say if we a Person is related to Department.If we need info for
person only we can state that and info for Department is not fetched along with Person.

* Supports outer-join whereby we can fetch multiple object at one shot.