Hibernate JavaDoc (6.0.0.CR1)

Hibernate ORM Aggregated Javadoc

Hibernate is a library for object/relation mapping (ORM). It provides:

• a native API centered around SessionFactory and Session,
• an implementation of the Java (or Jakarta) Persistence API (JPA), where the equivalent central interfaces are EntityManagerFactory and EntityManager, and
• a set of mapping annotations which augment the O/R mapping annotations defined by JPA, and which may be used with either API.

Native API

Along with SessionFactory and Session, applications using the native API will often make use of the following interfaces:

• Configuration to configure and bootstrap Hibernate,
• StatelessSession for processes involving many entity instances,
• Cache to manage the second-level cache,
• Transaction to control local transactions, and
• Query to execute HQL queries.

JPA

The JPA interfaces are defined by the JPA specification. For details see the latest specification along with the API documentation for the package jakarta.persistence.

Note that since Hibernate 5.2, the native API extends the JPA API rather than wrapping it (for example,SessionFactory extends EntityManagerFactory).

Mapping annotations

The mapping annotations defined by the JPA specification provide a foundation for expressing object/relational mappings in Hibernate and other JPA implementations. The annotations in the package org.hibernate.annotations extend this foundation and accommodate more specialized requirements. These annotation are not tied to the native API, and may be used in conjunction with the JPA API. The full power of Hibernate can only be unlocked via judicious use of these extra annotations.

Note about package categories

Hibernate categorizes packages into a number of groups based on intended consumers:

• API - classes to which application code will generally bind directly. These are generally classes which do not have spi nor internal in their package path and are not under the package org.hibernate.testing.
• SPI - classes to which integrator developers will commonly bind directly in order to develop extensions to Hibernate, or to alter its behavior in some way. These are generally under packages with spi in the package path.
• Testing Support - classes from the hibernate-testing artifact used in building Hibernate test cases. These are classes under the package org.hibernate.testing.

Complete Hibernate documentation may be found online at http://hibernate.org/orm/documentation/.