Chapter 3. Domain models and metadata

The "Hello World" example in the previous chapter introduced you to Hibernate; however, it isn't useful for understanding the requirements of real-world applications with complex data models. For the rest of the book, we use a much more sophisticated example application—CaveatEmptor, an online auction system—to demonstrate Hibernate and Java Persistence.

We start our discussion of the application by introducing a programming model for persistent classes. Designing and implementing the persistent classes is a multistep process that we'll examine in detail.