Installation and Set Up of Hibernate

This doesn’t need much motivation! You picked up this book because you wanted to learn how to use Hibernate.

Go to the Hibernate home page, http://www.hibernate.org/, and click on the “Download” link. The Binary Releases section will tell you which version is recommended for downloading; follow that advice. Make a note of the version you want and proceed to the “Download: SourceForge” link. It takes you to a SourceForge downloads page. Scroll down until you find the recommended release version of Hibernate itself (which will look something likehibernate-2.x.y.zip orhibernate-2.x.y.tar.gz). Choose the archive format that is most convenient for you and download it.

Pick a place that is suitable for keeping such items around, and expand the archive. We will use part of it in the next step, and investigate more of it later on. You may also want to poke around in there some yourself.

While you’re on the Hibernate downloads page, also pick up the Hibernate Extensions. They contain several useful tools which aren’t necessary for an application running Hibernate, but are very helpful for developers creating such applications. We’ll be using one to generate Java code for our first Hibernate experiment in the next chapter. This filename will look likehibernate-extensions-2.x.y.zip (it won’t necessarily have the same version as Hibernate itself). Once again, pick your favorite archive format, download this file, and expand it next to where you put Hibernate.