This article is about Hibernate, the java library for data persistence. I will attempt to explain some things, and provide some reasonably simple examples which demonstrate its use.
Basic concepts
Hibernate is all about data persistence. That is, the storage of information for later retrieval. Persistence can be handled in a very manual way via direct usage of jdbc through sql calls (java.sql package) or through a more managed way via a data persistence library. Hibernate is one of these libraries