The predecessor of this book, Hibernate in Action, started with a quote from Anthony Berglas: "Just because it is possible to push twigs along the ground with one's nose does not necessarily mean that that is the best way to collect firewood." Since then, the Hibernate project and the strategies and concepts software developers rely on to manage information have evolved. However, the fundamental issues are still the same—every company we work with every day still uses SQL databases, and Java is entrenched in the industry as the first choice for enterprise application development.

The tabular representation of data in a relational system is still fundamentally different than the networks of objects used in object-oriented Java applications. We still see the object/relational impedance mismatch, and we frequently see that the importance and cost of this mismatch is underestimated.

On the other hand, we now have a range of tools and solutions available to deal with this problem. We're done collecting firewood, and the pocket lighter has been replaced with a flame thrower.

Hibernate is now available in its third major release; Hibernate 3.2 is the version we describe in this book. Compared to older Hibernate versions, this new major release has twice as many features—and this book is almost double the size of Hibernate in Action. Most of these features are ones that you, the developers working with Hibernate every day, have asked for. We've sometimes said that Hibernate is a 90 percent solution for all the problems a Java application developer has to deal with when creating a database application. With the latest Hibernate version, this number is more likely 99 percent.

As Hibernate matured and its user base and community kept growing, the Java standards for data management and database application development were found lacking by many developers. We even told you not to use EJB 2.x entity beans in Hibernate in Action.

Enter EJB 3.0 and the new Java Persistence standard. This new industry standard is a major step forward for the Java developer community. It defines a lightweight and simplified programming model and powerful object/relational persistence. Many of the key concepts of the new standard were modeled after Hibernate and other successful object/relational persistence solutions. The latest Hibernate version implements the Java Persistence standard.

So, in addition to the new all-in-one Hibernate for every purpose, you can now use Hibernate like any Java Persistence provider, with or without other EJB 3.0 components and Java EE 5.0 services. This deep integration of Hibernate with such a rich programming model enables you to design and implement application functionality that was difficult to create by hand before.

We wrote this book to give you a complete and accurate guide to both Hibernate and Java Persistence (and also all relevant EJB 3.0 concepts). We hope that you'll enjoy learning Hibernate and that you'll keep this reference bible on your desk for your daily work.