This chapter is an introductory tutorial for new users of Hibernate. We start with a simple command line application using an in-memory database and develop it in easy to understand steps.

This tutorial is intended for new users of Hibernate but requires Java and SQL knowledge. It is based on a tutorial by Michael Gloegl, the third-party libraries we name are for JDK 1.4 and 5.0. You might need others for JDK 1.3.

The source code for the tutorial is included in the distribution in the doc/reference/tutorial/ directory.

First, we'll create a simple console-based Hibernate application. We use an Java database (HSQL DB), so we do not have to install any database server.

Let's assume we need a small database application that can store events we want to attend, and information about the hosts of these events.

The first thing we do, is set up our development directory and put all the Java libraries we need into it. Download the Hibernate distribution from the Hibernate website. Extract the package and place all required libraries found in /lib into into the /lib directory of your new development working directory. It should look like this:

.  +lib    antlr.jar    cglib.jar    asm.jar    asm-attrs.jars    commons-collections.jar    commons-logging.jar    hibernate3.jar    jta.jar    dom4j.jar    log4j.jar 

This is the minimum set of required libraries (note that we also copied hibernate3.jar, the main archive) for Hibernate at the time of writing. The Hibernate release you are using might require more or less libraries. See the README.txt file in the lib/ directory of the Hibernate distribution for more information about required and optional third-party libraries. (Actually, Log4j is not required but preferred by many developers.)

Next we create a class that represents the event we want to store in database

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