Persistence with Hibernate

Frameworks like Spring and Hibernate provided a means to solve some complex enterprise challenges. The critical difference between EJB 2.0 and frameworks like Spring and Hibernate is that this complexity is an option that you can elect to utilize, rather than an integral component of the framework architecture that you are forced to embrace.

In this chapter, you took a stroll down memory lane to see how persistence has evolved in the Java ecosystem, and now have a firmer understanding of the terminology as well as the distinctions between specifications and implementations. You’ve learned that you can have an application that uses many permutations of specifications and implementations. For instance, you can build a single application that uses EJB 3.0 for a distributed component-based architecture, with JPA for persistence powered by Hibernate as the JPA implementation. You also got a feel for the domain model and DAO structure that underpins our art gallery example application. Finally, you learned quite a lot about setting up a JPA application in a Spring environment. You are now armed with enough information to get a JPA application working.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue building the domain model for our art gallery application.