Understanding hibernate internals

Question

Hi,

Im trying to understand how hibernate works under the hood, how it manages lazy load, transactions, data mappers, unit of work, identity maps, etc.

I wrote a small object model, and im downloading hibernate's source code for debbuging it.

Im kind of lost, is this the best approach? Does documentation on these issues exist out there (web) ?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try the excellent book : Hibernate in Action, also debugging through the source is helpful but (I speak from experience of nhibernate only) understanding the principles before the implementation may be a better approach.

Answer 2

Hibernate in Action is old what you need is the 2nd edition Java Persistence in Action. This does a great job at going into the exotic cases and dealing with legacy db amongst other things but before you go spending money you should really look at this doc there you will see the reference docs as well as the FAQ, Common Problems, Advanced Problems plus you will see the annotations references which you will need if you are not using xml for your configuration.