Hibernate is a high-performance Object/Relational persistence and query service, which is licensed under the open source GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and is free to download. Hibernate not only takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types), but also provides data query and retrieval facilities.

This tutorial will teach you how to use Hibernate to develop your database based web applications in simple and easy steps.

Audience

This tutorial is designed for all those Java programmers who would like to understand the Hibernate framework and its API.

Prerequisites

We assume you have a good understanding of the Java programming language. A basic understanding of relational databases, JDBC, and SQL will be very helpful in understanding this tutorial.