I am a long time j2ee developer. I worked with many dao products in the past. I admitted I only worked with few projects that involved hibernate. I found it relatively hard to use (i.e. defining complex entity relationships, restrictive default one class one table model, difficulty of upgrading to a newer hibernate..etc ) comparing to other products like ibatis. I guess I would really like to understand why hibernate is still fairly popular despite its learning curve? What are the strengths of hibernate?

hi,

i might not be able to fully describe it to you nor will i try to convince against hibernate

so the thing is as u mentioned about ibatis/mybatis and assuming that you have worked on ibatis/mybatis and hibernate as well

yes there are other things that are very simple; and if the things are simple they are easier to implement right ?
so in hibernate here has much more things; try to explore it from the docs like sharding, search, .... which i guess are not in ibatis/mybatis

my point is that it totally depends upon your requirements and how you want to do it;

for example in a small project using simple mvc framework and with less complex database and architecture i will definitely go for hibernate alternatives (like ibatis) to make my project simple; since there is no need of hifi orm, sharding, ...

but if my project involve some complex db structure like sharding (cant think of any other example right now) i will definitely use hibernate to make my life easier and develop faster by concentrating on the application/business side.

hope that helps

ibatis (mybatis) is not a Object-Relational-Mapping-Framework (ORM), whilst hibernate is one.
This is a big difference in my opinion and therefore it is also difficult to compare them.

The other answers are really good. But to answer the "Why hibernate is so popular????" its because they are best of breed technologies that allow you to go faster. Hibernate does a lot more than just dependency injection and transactions. The provide solutions for JMS, scheduling, and other things. Plus, they are battle tested and well written. They allow you to focus on your business needs, and make some of the hard stuff go away.