Review: Hibernate: A Developer's Notebooks

Ramping up on an automated databasing framework Reviewer: Chris Jordan

Hibernate is a remarkable open source framework for Java which takes care of all the nasty JDBC coding you have to do for any application involving a database. One of the problems with JDBC is that it embeds SQL scripts directly into the Java code. This practice takes away from the object oriented quality of Java and results in messy code that is hard to debug and maintain. Hibernate helps Java developers in this regard by automating much of the databasing aspects of JDBCssh ssh .

Admittedly, this is the first 'Developer's Notebook' I have read from O'Reilly and I found it to be an excellent walk-through on Hibernate. This book is actually a text that you can read cover to cover comfortably while in front of the computer going through and developing their toy application. This style of book makes it really easy for anyone to pick up Hibernate over a few days, which is really nice as opposed to having to dig around the Web and IRC looking for advice on how stuff works. It even covers how to use ant, a tool similar to make, minus all the problems of make for Java, to get started on your hibernate applications.

One of the beefs I had with this book though is that it did not stress the importance of Entity Relationship (ER) design when developing a hibernate application. Hibernate does not make the need for ER-diagramming go away but in fact quite the opposite; if your applications are to be flexible and extensible it will need to have a good ER-design. Hibernate involves a fair bit of XML configuration before it can interact with your database and if you have to be mucking around with your ER-design during development then this becomes a pain. While this should be apparent to seasoned developers, it is something that newbies may miss out on. As such, I think it would have been well worth it for this book to have included an appendix on ER-design for completeness sake.

At any rate, I think that this book is an excellent read for anyone that want to get a quick handle on Hibernate in a few days. I rate it 4/5 Baltzers

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“Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook” is available from O'Reilly Media, Inc. for CAN $36.95 CA. Sample chapters can be obtained @ [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hibernate/chapter/ch03.pdf The O'Reilly Catalog].