Why NHibernate?

You might wonder why I chose NHibernate. Well, it's not because NHibernate is necessarily the best solution available. What is the best car? That's a silly question, right? It's always the standard answer: "It depends."

These are my motivations for choosing NHibernate for this chapter:

• Java heritage

  NHibernate is a port of the popular Hibernate [Hibernate]; therefore, many people know it, and there are a great deal of books and lots of other resources available for it. Furthermore, Object Relational Mapping is pretty mature in Java-land, contrary to .NET-land.

• Open source

  NHibernate is open source, and that makes it very approachable and easy to try.

In no way is this chapter intended to be an exhaustive guide to NHibernate. The purpose is just to make the discussions in Chapter 8 less abstract. I will also avoid getting into enumerating feature after feature; that's not very interesting, and that aspect of this book wouldn't be current for more than a few weeks after writing this chapter.

A possible effect, although not one of my main intentions, might be that the chapter could easily be written for any other Persistence Framework as well, therefore making it a little easier to compare different solutions. Let's see if that happens. (Hopefully there will then be a separate section entitled "What else should have been included in the comparison?".)

I will also not be discussing NHibernate in the context of an abstraction layer, such as NWorkspace [Nilsson Workspace]. The focus here will be on NHibernate itself and its API.

Let's start with an introduction to NHibernate.