Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.

F5 Framework Consultants have almost used Hibernate with every Java based project.

Hibernate Core for Java key features:

• Natural programming model - Hibernate supports natural OO idiom; inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework

• Support for fine-grained object models - a rich variety of mappings for collections and dependent objects

• No build-time bytecode enhancement - there's no extra code generation or bytecode processing steps in your build procedure

• Extreme scalability - Hibernate is extremely performant, has a dual-layer cache architecture, and may be used in a cluster

• The query options - Hibernate addresses both sides of the problem; not only how to get objects into the database, but also how to get them out again

• Support for "conversations" - Hibernate supports both long-lived persistence contexts, detach/reattach of objects, and takes care of optimistic locking automatically

• Free/open source - Hibernate is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License)

• EJB 3.0 - Hibernate implements the Java Persistence management API and object/relational mapping options, two members of the Hibernate team are active in the expert group