1) Introduction
Hibernate is a powerful technology for persisting data in any kind of Application. Spring, on the other hand is a dependency injection framework that supports IOC. The beauty of Spring is that it can integrates well with most of the prevailing popular technologies. In this article, we will discuss on how it is possible to integrate Spring with Hibernate. This article assumes that the reader has a basic understanding in both Spring and Hibernate Frameworks.
If you are new to Spring and Hibernate frameworks, please read the introduction articles on Spring and Hibernate before start reading this article. Raja has explained in Introduction to Spring Framework. This article will help you to understand the fundamentals of the Spring framework. In another article Introduction to Hibernate published on 12/05/2007 by Shunmuga Raja explains what is ORM framework and how to start writing the simple hibernate application.
As a pre-requisite, let us understand the need for such integration before we actually get into the integration between these two technologies. It is well known that Hibernate is a powerful ORM tool that lies between Application and Database. It enables Application to access data from any database in a platform-independent manner. There is no need for the Application to depend on the low-level JDBC details like managing connection, dealing with statements and result sets. All the necessary details for accessing a particular data source is easily configurable in Xml files. Another good thing is that Hibernate can be coupled well with both J2SE and J2EE Applications.
One of the problem with using Hibernate is that the client Application that accesses the database using Hibernate Framework has to depend on the Hibernate APIs like Configuration, SessionFactory and Session. These objects will continue to get scattered across the code throughout the Application. Moreover, the Application code has to manually maintain and manage these objects. In the case of Spring, the business objects can be highly configurable with the help of IOC Container. In simple words, the state of an object can be externalized from the Application code. It means that now it is possible to use the Hibernate objects as Spring Beans and they can enjoy all the facilities that Spring provides.
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