Hello,

Im new to Hibernate and I would like to know what you personally would advice me to use:
Should I use Annotations for my Hibernate Configurations or a mapping-file?
What is easier and what will be used in future - what do you think?

Thanks for answering me!!

I would say the answer would be ... yes.

In other words, I personally prefer using both. I like using annotations to show relationships, but I would avoid specifying database-specific information in your annotations, like table and column names, for instance.

This will result in some redundant information, which is obviously a disadvantage. It also means that many of your annotations are actually being ignored (entries in the mapping file for a property override the annotations). That's also unfortunate.

If you're trying to use pure JPA (including the mapping specification), you may find situations where you need to use a Hibernate-specific annotation because of some feature that you need. In that case, you may have to comment out the analogous entries in the mapping file (I prefer to do this instead of removing the entry), so the mapping file doesn't override the annotation.

thats interesting, thanks for your answer!
I will then use the mapping file, like I did before. Can you give me an example when using annotations is necessary? Im new and I try to learn as much and as fast as I can! :)

Concerning when annotations are necessary, this would happen if you're strictly using JPA, with Hibernate (Kodo, OpenJPA, EclipseLink, TopLink, ...) as the implementation. The problem is that the JPA spec doesn't have any vendor extension mechanism for the mapping file. If a JPA implementation provides configurable added-value features (above the spec), there's no way to configure it in the mapping file. In those cases, the only option is to use the vendor-specific annotation.

ok, thank you very much for answering!