2 Million Downloads + 5 Years = 25 Books

Hibernate is now 5 years old, Happy Birthday!

Hibernate has been downloaded more than 2 Million times.

In the last five years, Hibernate was able to redefine how Java (and now also .NET) developers work with SQL databases.

Today, many associates at Red Hat and people working in other companies contribute to the continuing success of Hibernate, as a product and as an open source project. Thousands of people work with Hibernate every day. Many contribute patches and bug reports, to help move Hibernate along its path. Invaluable for Hibernate, as an open source project, is the community of developers who help each other out on the Hibernate discussion forum.

Manning sponsored 25 copies of Java Persistence with Hibernate that have been distributed to Hibernate contributors and community members. We also asked the community contributors how they got into Hibernate and why they are active in the community. Here is what they sent:

Eric Kershner from the USA writes:

I am a recent addition to the Java world in general and to third-party ORM solutions. In my previous life as a Windows client-server developer, I had created a custom ORM solution. About the last thing I wanted to do when I switched to Java was to redevelop an ORM. Enter Hibernate, with all of the features that I was used to having from my custom built solution along with innumerable additions! Transaction management was brilliant, and the design patterns of the source code was innovatively realized. I've been gung-ho on Hibernate ever since then, recommending it to anyone who bothers to ask about it. Now, I do my best to check in on the forums to answer the same questions that plagued me when I first started, although my time limitations have not allowed me to do this as much as I would have liked (crunch time yet again). I've been working a bit on the Hibernate Tools package, the reverse engineering dialects for Oracle in specific.

Michael Ploed from Germany writes:

I came to Hibernate in 2003 by evaluating several persistence related frameworks. Since Hibernate had the best documentation at that time I started digging into it. My first professional project in Hibernate took place around the year 2004 and was based on the 2.x code branch. At that time I also started writing articles about Hibernate and I got active in the community by providing help to other users and by promoting Hibernate through talks and publications.

Raja Venkataraman from India writes:

What interested me: Ive long been interested in the jboss forums, the main reason being it encourages you to think more about various kinds of problems people face. Thats where I first heard about Hibernate(in the EJB forums) and I started looking at Hibernate(in the 2.1 days). One of the reasons I liked it was the amount of flexibility it gives when doing ORM. Most of the other frameworks make you bend (to varying degrees) to adapt to their framework and I found Hibernate very minimal and non-obtrusive. Also the variable configuration and plugin mechanisms made me look into the well-written code(I still have to grasp the AST parser code -- makes my head spin anytime I look at it). You can only afford to make a few mistakes in your code and forums help you think out of the box and try and solve problems that many people have. I cant repeat but say how nicely its for anyone to understand the code (if there is an inclination to understand the internals).

Nathan Moon from the USA writes:

I’ve been using Hibernate for about 2 years now, at 2 different jobs. I am a supporter of open source and wish I had more time to contribute. I have submitted a few bugs and a patch or two to Hibernate, and have tried to stay active in the forums. I think Hibernate is an amazing framework and look forward to using it for a long time to come. Thanks Hibernate team!

Baptiste Mathus from France writes:

I discovered Hibernate 3 years ago when it was still in v2. Then I used it last year in a real project. We're now using it in our company as a central component and use it every day!

Preston Sheldon from the USA writes:

I was working on a project in the UK using TopLink in 2003 and wanted to be able to gain a better understanding of ORM solutions. I searched the internet for open source options and found Hibernate to be comparable to what I was using and most of all, well documented. I convinced the architect on the project to take a look at Hibernate and he was also very impressed. We then used it to implement an internal project. I have since convinced several contract employers I've worked with to switch from JDBC to a Hibernate solution. I spent a lot of time answering questions on the forum, although not much lately, because I felt it was the best way for me to increase my knowledge of the product.

Surya Gaddipati from the USA writes:

I didn't really start using Hibernate in frustration with EJB 2.0 as most people but for simple object to db mapping ..slowly realizing that its much much more than just that ...

Andres Gonzalez Rodriguez from Spain writes:

I've been programming in Java for almost three years. And i was tired of, you know, having this Customer.java DTO object, this CustomerManager.java object and the SQL scripts for creating the tables on the DB. I was tired of typing each field 5 or 6 times! With hibernate i don't have to type all those SQL's again, I define my POJOs and their mappings (or only the POJOs if using annotations) and i'm done. And, of course, i can always "get dirty" with the SQL for performance reasons using native SQL. As today i feel the classic "how could i work without this before?" :)

Chris Koch from the USA writes:

The other option involved writing way too much SQL.