Spring MVC 3, Hibernate Annotations, MySQL Integration Tutorial

In this tutorial we will build a simple Spring MVC 3 application for managing a list of persons. We will provide a simple CRUD system for viewing, adding, editing, and deleting of persons. For the persistence layer, we will use Hibernate 3 annotations and use MySQL as our database, though the application is flexible enough to utilize different databases. A prior knowledge of MVC, ORM, and SQL is assumed in this tutorial. This tutorial is similar with Spring 3 MVC - Hibernate 3: Using Annotations Integration Tutorial
What is Hibernate?

Hibernate is an object-relational mapping (ORM) library for the Java language, providing a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Hibernate solves object-relational impedance mismatch problems by replacing direct persistence-related database accesses with high-level object handling functions
What is MySQL?

The MySQL Database powers the most demanding Web, E-commerce and Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. It is a fully integrated transaction-safe, ACID compliant database with full commit, rollback, crash recovery and row level locking capabilities. MySQL delivers the ease of use, scalability, and performance that has made MySQL the world's most popular open source database. Some of the world's most trafficked websites like Facebook, Google, ticketmaster, and eBay rely on MySQL for their business critical applications.

Let's preview first the final structure of our project.

And here's how our application would look like:

It's a simple, crude CRUD system (pun intended).

We start by defining our domain object Person

Person

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Person is a simple POJO containing four private fields:

id

firstName

lastName

money

Each of these fields have been annotated with @Column and assigned with corresponding names.

ID

FIRST_NAME

LAST_NAME

MONEY

These column names are database column names. You don't deal with them. Instead, Hibernate is the one responsible for managing your database. However, you are responsible for declaring the column names in the POJO. You don't declare them in your database. Remember your database doesn't exist yet.

The POJO has been annotated to map to a database table. If you look at the declaration of the Person class we see the annotation @Table and the name of the actual table:

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Notice the annotation @Entity before the @Table. This tells Hibernate that this POJO should be mapped to a database table.

Since we will manipulate a list of persons, let's declare a service that manipulates a list of Persons.