We will write a simple hibernate application to get started with hibernate.

Before starting, you should:

Hibernate 4 jars can be downloaded from the SourceForge web site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4 or from http://hibernate.org/orm/downloads/.  If this url doesn’t work or get changed, just search ‘hibernate 4 jars download sourceforge’ in Google.  The distribution version downloaded here is 4.3.11. Except for the version numbers, the jar names and folder structure should be same across any version of hibernate4 distribution.  

We will download and install Java EE 7 SDK which comes with GlassFish Open Source Edition 4 (currently 4.1.1)and then configure eclipse to deploy Java EE applications directly to GlassFish Server. You can download the latest Java EE 7 SDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/downloads/index.html. You can also directly download the latest commercially supported GlassFish Server distribution (currently 3.1.2.2) from the same link.

Hibernate provide Criteria Queries as an object-oriented alternative to HQL. Criteria Query is used to modify the objects and provide restriction for the objects. Many complex queries in HQL or even SQL may become larger over a period of time and spread over many lines; and will be difficult to update and maintain. We have already seen HQL in http://javajee.com/introduction-to-hibernate-query-language-hql-in-hibernate-43.

We can have queries saved with a name and later we can retrieve them simply using that name. We use @NamedQuery annotation to declare a named query. We can also have a named query for native sql. For native SQL we use the annotation @NamedNativeQuery annotation. This is one of the important advantages of having a named query: you can write native SQL. You can retrieve a Query object from a saved query name (hql and native named query) using session.getNamedQuery method.