I am fairly new to Hibernate and have been wrestling with trying to get an EventListener to work in my application. I first tried with Hibernate 4.0.1 and found many conflicting posts on how to configure it. So, I thought I would fall back to an earlier version of Hibernate (3.3.1.GA) to see if that made it any easier. I added several listeners to the hibernate.cfg.xml file but once again, none of them are getting triggered/called. before I post any code, etc, in the forum, I wanted to see first if event listeners are valid when using standalone Hibernate (ie, no Spring, Grails, etc).