Question

I am in the process of troubleshooting a recent translation of EJB code to native Hibernate code (painful process, since EJB spoiled me so much with its convenience).

One thing I find troublesome is that Hibernate keeps its entity declarations in a hbm.xml file and then the configurations in separate files. While this isn’t necessarily a big issue, the Netbeans wizard doesn’t really let the developer to just click a button, detect, all the entities on the fly, and update the configuration file.

With persistence.xml, however, I can do that easily by just adding the classes and forget about it. Another good thing is that persistence.xml stores pretty much everything needed for the ORM aside from the class-specific annotations (which I am keeping).

With that said, is there any way for me to have Hibernate to (1) stay off EE and (2) use persistence.xml to get the connection, mapping, etc?

Also, a related question – CriteriaQuery is apparently a Java EE thing. One thing I really like about using EJB is that there are strong compile-time contraints. For instance, I can put ClassName_.myAttribute directly as a parameter in a CriteriaQuery, whereas if I use the Hibernate native “Criteria” object, I have to use “my_attribute” instead, which is not subjected to compile time integrity checks (Note: ClassName_.myAttribute maps to “my_attribute” on the table).

So is there anyway to keep that compile-time integrity?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hibernate EntityManager can be used outside of a Java EE container. See http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/4.0/hem/en-US/html_single/#architecture-javase.

Moreover, even with the Hibernate native API, since you’re using annotations, you don’t need any hbm.xml file. Just a central Hibernate config file listing the entities and some Hibernate properties.