Preface

Like many others, I started writing my own persistence framework before I discovered Hibernate. In 2002, I was working on a large business-to-business portal that underwent frequent changes. It seemed that the persistence code changed weekly, making it impossible to both maintain the SQL and have a stable system. My first attempt at a persistence framework covered a few of the basics: associations and SQL generation. When these proved insufficient for my needs, I realized the task was large and began looking at the available persistence options for Java applications. I soon decided to go with Hibernate.

Hibernate was still relatively new at the time; version 1.0 had just been released. However, it seemed the logical choice - it wasn't overly complicated and offered the features that I needed and didn't have time to implement. Hibernate also didn't require that I change my existing code to accommodate it.

I quickly became impressed by Hibernate, having used it on a few projects. In the developer community, its popularity skyrocketed with version 2.0. I wrote a well received introductory article about Hibernate for TheServerSide, and eventually received an offer to contribute to the upcoming book Hibernate in Action from Manning. Shortly after that, Manning asked if I would be interested in writing another, complementary book on Hibernate with co-author Patrick Peak.

Patrick too had written articles on TheServerSide and we discovered a mutual interest in working together. The idea of writing a complete book loomed as a daunting undertaking but we could not resist. We decided to write the book as quickly as possible, while still publishing a first rate product.

Hibernate Quickly is the end result. Unlike Hibernate in Action which is an exhaustive reference, this book attempts to introduce the reader quickly to the core knowledge needed to start being productive with Hibernate. It uses the remaining pages to cover the larger environment that Hibernate operates in - the Hibernate "ecosystem." Hibernate 3 was released as we were finishing the writing and the book covers the newest, version 3.0 features.

Of course, we couldn't have done it alone - writing a book is a team effort and our team included reviewers, friends, colleagues, and the staff at Manning. I hope you will learn as much from reading this book as we did writing it.