Hibernate - Environment

This chapter will explain how to install Hibernate and other associated packages to prepare a develop environment for the Hibernate applications. We will work with MySQL database to experiment with Hibernate examples, so make sure you already have setup for MySQL database. For a more detail on MySQL you can check our MySQL Tutorial.

Downloading Hibernate:

It is assumed that you already have latest version of Java is installed on your machine. Following are the simple steps to download and install Hibernate on your machine.

• Make a choice whether you want to install Hibernate on Windows, or Unix and then proceed to the next step to download .zip file for windows and .tz file for Unix.
• Download the latest version of Hibernate from http://www.hibernate.org/downloads.
• At the time of writing this tutorial I downloaded hibernate-distribution-3.6.4.Final and when you unzip the downloaded file it will give you directory structure as follows.

Installing Hibernate:

Once you downloaded and unzipped the latest version of the Hibernate Installation file, you need to perform following two simple steps. Make sure you are setting your CLASSPATH variable properly otherwise you will face problem while compiling your application.

• Now copy all the library files from /lib into your CLASSPATH, and change your classpath variable to include all the JARs:
• Finally copy hibernate3.jar file into your CLASSPATH. This file lies in the root directory of the installation and is the primary JAR that Hibernate needs to do its work.

Hibernate Prerequisites:

Following is the list of the packages/libraries required by Hibernate and you should install them before starting with Hibernate. To install these packages you would have to copy library files from /lib into your CLASSPATH, and change your CLASSPATH variable accordingly.

S.N.	Packages/Libraries
1	dom4j - XML parsing www.dom4j.org/
2	Xalan - XSLT Processor http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/
3	Xerces - The Xerces Java Parser http://xml.apache.org/xerces-j/
4	cglib - Appropriate changes to Java classes at runtime http://cglib.sourceforge.net/
5	log4j - Logging Faremwork http://logging.apache.org/log4j
6	Commons - Logging, Email etc. http://jakarta.apache.org/commons
7	SLF4J - Logging Facade for Java http://www.slf4j.org