What is Hibernate, Hibernate History and Features of Hibernate?

What is Hibernate, Hibernate History and Features of Hibernate?

What is Hibernate?

Hibernate is the ORM tool given to transfer the data between a java (object) application and a database (Relational) in the form of the objects.
Hibernate is the open source light weight tool given by Gavin King, actually JBoss server is also created by this person only.
Hibernate is a non-invasive framework, means it won’t forces the programmers to extend/implement any class/interface, and in hibernate we have all POJO classes so its light weight.
Hibernate can runs with in or without server, i mean it will suitable for all types of java applications (stand alone or desktop or any servlets etc....)
Hibernate is purely for persistence (to store/retrieve data from Database).
Hibernate goal is to relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence related programming tasks.

Type of Software	ORM Software (or) ORM Persistence
Vendor	From SoftTree(RedHat)
Creator	Mr.Gavin King
Type of availability	OpenSource Software
Versions	2.X, 3.X, 4.X, 5.X

Hibernate History?

Hibernate was started in 2001 by Gavin King as an alternative to using EJB2-style entity beans. Its mission back then was to simply offer better persistence capabilities than offered by EJB2 by simplifying the complexities and allowing for missing features.
Early in 2003, the Hibernate development team began Hibernate2 releases which offered many significant improvements over the first release and would go on to catapult HIbernate as the "de facto" standard for persistence in Java... Hibernate3, JPA, etc..

Features of Hibernate ?

Hibernate persists java objects into database (Instead of primitives).
It provides Database services in Database vendor independent Manner, so that java applications become portable across the multiple databases.
Hibernate generates efficient queries for java application to communicate with Database.
It provides fine-grained exception handling mechanism.
In hibernate we only have Un-checked Exceptions, so no need to write try, catch, or no need to throws Exceptions.
It supports synchronization between in-memory java objects and relational records
Hibernate provides implicit connection pooling mechanism.
Hibernate supports Inheritance, Associations, Collections.
Hibernate supports a special query language(HQL) which is Database vendor independent.
Hibernate has capability to generate primary keys automatically while we are storing the records into database.
Hibernate addresses the mismatches between java and database.
Hibernate provides automatic change detection.
Hibernate often reduces the amount of code needed to be written, so it imnproves the productivity.
Database objects (tables, views, procedures, cursors, functions ... etc) name changes will not affect hibernate code.
Supports over 30 dialects.
Hibernate provides caching mechanism for efficient data retrieval, Lazy loading concept is also included in hibernate so you can easily load objects on start up time.
Getting pagination in hibernate is quite simple.
Hibernate Supports automatic versioning of rows.