front matter
Relational databases are indisputably at the core of the modern enterprise. While modern programming languages, including Java, provide an intuitive, object-oriented view of application-level business entities, the enterprise data underlying these entities is heavily relational in nature. Further, the main strength of the relational model—over earlier navigational models as well as over later OODB models—is that by design it is intrinsically agnostic to the programmatic manipulation and application-level view of the data that it serves up. Many attempts have been made to bridge relational and object-oriented technologies, or to replace one with the other, but the gap between the two is one of the hard facts of enterprise computing today. It is this challenge—to provide a bridge between relational data and Java objects—that Hibernate takes on through its object/relational mapping (ORM) approach. Hibernate meets this challenge in a very pragmatic, direct, and realistic way.