Question

I’m refreshing my Spring knowledge, reading the reference documentation for spring 3.1. Last time i read about spring as best practice was set JdbcDaoSupport and HibernateDaoSupport, now they are not even mentioned.
Also I have the impression that HibernateTemplete is not preferable any more, instead we just inject the SessionFactory in the DAO. So my question is: What are the best practices for using Spring with JDBC/Hibernate.

Answer 1

HibernateDaoSupport and HibernateTemplete used to provide the facility for translation of Hibernate 2’s checked exceptions into Spring’s non-checked exception hierarchy. Also, HibernateTemplete provided a richer API than the raw Hibernate Session interface.

The exception translation can now be done using the @Repository annotation and transparent exception translation, possible because Hibernate 3 uses runtime exceptions. Also, the Session interface is richer than it used to be, although it still falls short of the number of convenience methods provided by HibernateTemplate.

In short, these support classes aren’t as useful as they used to be, and now writing Spring DAOs without reference to the Spring API is easy. However, they still provide some additional convenience, so you may choose to still use them.

There is no right or wrong approach, though.