A concise introduction to Hibernate's many configuration and design options, this book distills Hibernate into digestible pieces with many code examples, practical usage scenarios, and coverage of the tools available to developers writing Hibernate applications. Using a crawl, walk, run teaching methodology, developers will learn what Hibernate is, what it can do, and how it can be used effectively. New Hibernate features are covered and the provided code examples are incrementally evolved as new concepts are introduced. The examples included execute from Ant and run as JUnit test cases. An understanding of JUnit is not required and running the code as a series of test cases allows for the easily demonstrated functionality without resorting to a complicated web application. How Hibernate can work with other common development tools and frameworks like XDoclet, Struts, Webwork, Spring, and Tapestry is also discussed as well as writing mapping files and creating associations.