Hibernate is a popular - perhaps the most popular - open source Java Object/Relational Mapping tool. Hibernate lets you write your persistent classes using standard JavaBeans idioms. You then map these beans to any relational database using simple XML mapping files. For our April 14 meeting, Eric Burke will introduce Hibernate and show how to configure and use it. If you are looking for something more flexible and portable than straight JDBC, this talk is for you.

Eric Burke is a Principal Software Engineer with Object Computing, Inc and an O'Reilly author. After working on a large JDBC project, he realized that JDBC and SQL are too repetitive and database-specific. He decided to investigate Hibernate in order to "do it better" the next time around.