Hibernate

Hibernate is a free, open source Java Package which makes very easy to work with relational databases. It is an object relational mapping (ORM) library for the Java language. It lets you develop persistent classes following common Java idiom along with association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework. Hibernate not just takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables but also provides data query and retrieval facilities and can significantly reduce development time which is otherwise spent with manual data handling in SQL and JDBC.

Hibernate makes it look as if your database contains plain Java objects like one you use daily and without worrying about how to get them out of mysterious database tables. Hibernate provides transparent persistence for Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs). The only strict requirement for a persistent class is a no argument constructor and not necessarily public. Hibernate liberates you to focus on the objects and features of your application, without having to worry about how to store them or find them later. To work on Hibernate, you need to create an XML “mapping document” telling the Hibernate classes you want to be able to store in a database and how they relate to the tables and columns in that database and then you can ask it to fetch data as objects or store objects as data for you. The basic eligibility required for Hibernate is to have basic knowledge of XML, Relational database and Java code. The Hibernate API is quite simple to learn and interacts quite naturally with the flow of your program. Hibernate programmers are employed by the companies that work on Java platform and deals with high amount of data in relational database.