Question

This was working:

<bean id="sessionFactory"  
      class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
...

but upgrading to the aforementioned versions breaks it. What is the correct method to create a SessionFactory bean with Spring 3.1.Release and Hibernate 4.0.0.FINAL?

The error on deploy is:

nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
Lorg/hibernate/cache/CacheProvider;

EDIT
Have added my own answer, which fixed it for me.

Answer 1

I think you should use org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.LocalSessionFactoryBean instead of
org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean

From LocalSessionFactoryBean javadoc:

NOTE: This variant of LocalSessionFactoryBean requires Hibernate 4.0 or higher. It is similar in role to the same-named class in the orm.hibernate3 package. However, in practice, it is closer to AnnotationSessionFactoryBean since its core purpose is to bootstrap a SessionFactory from annotation scanning.