This article is an overview of some of the lessons that we've learnt with Hibernate at Shine. In it we'll share with you our thoughts on Hibernate after using it on a couple of large projects. We'll also present a liberal sprinkling of real-world examples. We hope that by reading this article, you'll learn from the experiences that we've had when using Hibernate.

This article won't be telling you how to use Hibernate. There are already plenty of resources on the web that do that (the Hibernate website is an excellent place to start). Nor will it be telling you what Hibernate "best practices" are. The reason for this is that blindly applying such practices can often be as bad as not applying them at all (an example of this is J2EE Blueprints: in our experience they are often applied when not actually necessary, leading to over-engineered systems that take too long to build and are difficult to understand).

So let's get started. We'll begin with some of our broader views on Hibernate, and then work into more practical issues. Or you can jump straight to the section that interests you.