Spring vs Hibernate

Question

Just trying to get my head round Spring and figuring out how I wire up an Oracle connection in xml config file, and now find out I need yet another framework! - Hibernate, this is soooo frustrating as it feels like I'm getting deeper and deeper into more and more frameworks without actually getting what I need done!

I looked at Hibernate and it seems to do similar things to Spring, bearing in mind I just want to do some SQL inserts in Oracle.

I am reluctant and do not have time to learn 2 frameworks - could I get away with just adopting Hibernate for the simple things I need to do?

Answer 1

Hi,

Spring and Hibernate are totally different frameworks for different problems. Spring is a huge framework with many many features, Hibernate is an O/R bridge.

I would recommend using plain old JDBC in your case ('just some SQL inserts in Oracle').

Answer 2

Spring and Hibernate are really intended to do two different things. Spring is first and foremost an inversion-of-control container and configuration subsystem, while Hibernate is a database binding and lazy loading engine. If you don't want to introduce a bunch of new stuff into your code, stick with Spring and roll your own queries or use iBatis to do much simpler database binding.

Answer 3

You could get away with using just spring and spring-JDBC integration. Depending on the complexity of your data-access needs it may be more than enough. The spring Object-relation mapping is also worth looking into if you're going to do a lot of data-access.

The nice thing about spring is that it's a very loosely coupled framework. So you can read up on the bits you use, and forget the rest - even in the runtime.