Introduction to Hibernate Tools

Hibernate tools are packed withing a toolkit comprising of various ready to use tools for hibernating implementations. IT is present in eclipse in an integrated suite added via plugins. They are also basic to Jboss tools. They make an important part of the JBoss developer studio to facilitate its usage in Jboss. These tools provide easy testing, code generation facility of hibernating mapped projects. We can use these tools for browsing mappings, run queries, data manipulations and code generation for data-based projects.

Top 12 Hibernate Tools

Some of the tools and their features are listed below along with the explanation and its application:

1. Code Editor

In this case, it is more of a mapping editor used to map hibernate with the backend database. This is used for proposing properties while coding, auto-compilation facility and syntax highlighting. An editor helps code looks clean and understandable by various formatting options defaulted. It supports auto semantic completion by suggesting column, table, row names based on the usage history.

2. Code Generation Launch for Hibernating

It is used to generate an artifact based on the hibernate model. Hibernate tools come preloaded with a code generation launch template in which one can take a configured hibernate model and use it for various code generation tasks.

3. Multiple Runtimes

Hibernate tools support various major versions of hibernate to provide the flexibility of its usage in the nay version stored. Some of the versions it supports are JPA for JAVA persistence style projects, core for hbm.xml and annotations for hibernating.

4. Hibernate Console

This console works like any other JAVA or C console. To check the data extraction queries (HQL) and fetch the real-time results we can make use of the console. The console is used to display the results after running the queries. The hibernate console helps by providing visualizations of database connections, classes, and their relationships. The console can be used to derive the changed results as per queries (HQL change database query).

5. Reverse Engineering

This tool enables the function of generating domain model classes, mapping files for hibernating, annotated entities from EJB3 entity beans, HTML codes and many more things. This provides control over various aspects involving the translation of data from the database to the persistence objects in the front end. Forex: How tables containing one to many relationships should be detected and its mapping should be done as one to many or some other mapping instead. It can also provide more control over this translation process with the help of a reveng.xml file or any class with reverse engineering strategy implemented, using which one can have even more and finer control over this process.

6. Mapping Diagrams

This is an extended feature of the hibernating console. One can visualize the mappings using this tool. This tool can be accessed using a hibernate console window. It has given an overview of the created hibernate model used in the form of mappings over the screen. IT can be zoomed in or out as per the convenience to view detailed structure. It makes visualizing a larger model simpler due to its user-friendly interface. There are various other controls as well present in this tool like toggle, collapse or expand tables and classes, hide tables or classes, set zoom level, etc.

7. Editor for HQL

This editor provides an editor to write HQL statements or programs. It is used to highlight important and opening syntaxes, changs the color of keywords, etc making the code look clean and easily understandable.

8. Dynamic Preview

This tool is an alled dynamic SQL previewer. One can see a live effect of implemented queries. This feature is very handy for coders as they get real-time insights into what they are writing and how their code is impacting the database.

9. XML Editor

It provides a hbm.xml editor that works as a source for coders who are developing XML documents. JAVA classes, its properties, hibernate types and many more such features can be implemented XML page while editing it via the XML editor tool.

10. Criteria Editor

It is used to cherish the full power of JAVA prototyping. This is a type of editing tool for writing JAVA codes. WE can open a new criteria editor by right-clicking on an entity. From the right-click menu we can choose criteria editor. This editor imports all the relevant classes, hibernate models, last returned java object and based on these objects it will execute the query or visualize it.

11. Copying Facilities

The tools have this flexibility to extract the HQL code from the java code. The copied HQL code then can be copied onto the editor separately. The purpose of doing this is in case we are writing a complex HQL query and want to run it before simply putting it in the JAVA code. WE run to check if our query is working as expected. There is a risk involved indirectly putting queries in java code without checking it in case our query is deleting or manipulating data values from the database. If the query works then saving the editor will update the query back to the java code automatically thus saving time and efforts.

12. Wizards

There are various built-in wizards present in hibernate application used to quickly generate configuration files, mapping files or console configurations automatically in the background where ever needed.

Conclusion

It is quite easy to work with hibernate due to various tools linked to hibernate. Many APIs make this even easier to implement hibernate. HQL language is easy to understand and coder can do any possible updation or extraction using it. Several config files required while its implementations can be created in the background using various tools. Also, many editors make the work simpler and interactive.