Tools for Hibernate 2.x

The tools used for roundtrip development in Hibernate 2 provide support for transforming to

and from sourcecode (java), mappingfiles (hbm) and a database definition (ddl). Use the new tools for Hibernate 3.x.

The goal of these tools is to help support the usage of Hibernate in almost any kind of development scenario. For example, if you start with an existing (legacy) database, use the tools to generate Hibernate mapping files and Java source files. If you start with Java code, you can markup your classes with XDoclet tags and automatically generate Hibernate mapping files from your annotations. Of course, you can also generate a SQL database schema (DDL) automatically from a Hibernate mapping.

Note, that not all tools provide complete support for all features in Hibernate, as it is simply not possible to generate every output from every input (for example, a database schema doesn't have enough information to generate perfect Java classes).

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