Spring and Hibernate

Spring can simplify your Hibernate application. Spring's Hibernate integration uses the same generic transaction infrastructure and DAO exception hierarchy that it uses for JDBC, JDO, iBATIS, and TopLink, making it easy to mix and match persistence methodologies if necessary.

There are two approaches to Spring's Hibernate integration:

1. Inversion of Control with a HibernateTemplate and Callback
2. Extending HibernateDaoSupport and Applying an AOP Interceptor

The IoC/HibernateTemplate methodology feels a lot like the JdbcTemplate methodology described in the last section. For this example, I will show the HibernateDaoSupport/AOP Interceptor approach.

After you have written your standard Hibernate mappings, there basically three things that you need to do to use Spring's HibernateDaoSupport to implement a DAO:

 

1. Configure the Hibernate SessionFactory
2. Extend your DAO Implementation from HibernateDaoSupport
3. Wire in Transaction Support with AOP

So let's do another implementation of the WidgetDAO using Hibernate. First of all, here is our Hibernate XML mapping for the Widget class:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping SYSTEM
  "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">

<hibernate-mapping package="com.sample.springrecipes.model">
  <class name="Widget" table="WIDGETS">
    <id name="id" column="WIDGET_ID" type="long">
      <generator class="native"/>
    </id>
    <property name="name" column="NAME" type="string"/>
    <property name="size" column="SIZE" type="int"/>
  </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

 

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