Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use Hibernate in your Spring applications. Using Hibernate is just like using any other RAD tool. In simple applications, you get very good performance for very little programming; however, if you want or need to take full control over the data access layer of your application, you may find that Hibernate is simply too slow. It is not a fault of the framework itself; it is just that sometimes the queries to build the objects defined in the mapping files are simply too complex. The good news is that Spring allows you to start off with Hibernate and then move toward other DAO implementations if you find that Hibernate's performance does not meet your expectations.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at iBATIS, which represents the second type of ORM framework. You will see that even though there is a bit more code involved, iBATIS is a viable alternative to Hibernate.