Hibernate Tools

Please note that this release is a preview release and considered alpha quality. The presented functionality (reverse engineering, code generation, etc.) is also be available outside of Eclipse, ie. as Ant tasks. See the Hibernate Tools website for more information about the road map.

1. Introduction

We have made significant improvements to the Hibernate toolset for Hibernate3. This is however work in progress and we'll continue to implement new ideas and features as the third generation of the Hibernate3 object persistence stack evolves.

The first set of tools we offer are plugins for the Eclipse IDE. The following features are available:

Mapping Editor: An editor for Hibernate XML mapping files, supporting auto-completion and syntax highlighting. It also supports semantic auto-completion for class names and property/field names, making it much more versatile than a normal XML editor.

Console: The console is a new view in Eclipse. In addition to a tree overview of your console configurations, you also get an interactive view of your persistent classes and their relationships. The console allows you to execute HQL queries against your database and browse the result directly in Eclipse.

Development Wizards: Several wizards are provided with the Hibernate Eclipse tools; you can use a wizard to quickly generate Hibernate configuration (cfg.xml) files, or you may even completely reverse engineer an existing database schema into POJO source files and Hibernate mapping files. The reverse engineering wizard supports customizable templates.

2. Requirements

1. Install Eclipse 3.1 (http://www.eclipse.org)

After you have downloaded the Hibernate Tools for Eclipse, unpack and copy the plugins to your Eclipse plugins directory. Sometimes Eclipse does not automatically detect new plugins and thus the tools will not be activated. To ensure eclipse sees these changes run eclipse with the -clean option. E.g. eclipse -clean

You will also need JDBC drivers for your database available to use the reverse engineering and querying support.

Please note that these tools do not try to hide any functionality of Hibernate. The tools make working with Hibernate easier, but you are still encouraged/required to read the documentation for Hibernate to fully utilize Hibernate.