Chapter 2. Starting a project

You want to start using Hibernate and Java Persistence, and you want to learn it with a step-by-step example. You want to see both persistence APIs and how you can benefit from native Hibernate or standardized JPA. This is what you'll find in this chapter: a tour through a straightforward "Hello World" application.

However, a good and complete tutorial is already publicly available in the Hibernate reference documentation, so instead of repeating it here, we show you more detailed instructions about Hibernate integration and configuration along the way. If you want to start with a less elaborate tutorial that you can complete in one hour, our advice is to consider the Hibernate reference documentation. It takes you from a simple stand-alone Java application with Hibernate through the most essential mapping concepts and finally demonstrates a Hibernate web application deployed on Tomcat.