Can someone please give me some guidance as to how I can run hibernate outside of an app server? Like in the simplest case where I just want to start up hibernate, pass in an xml mapping file and start testing some domain objects. I don't need all the code, just the startup code because everything I have tried doesn't work :/

Click on "Documentation" on our website and take the "I have 15 minutes to learn Hibernate" tour. The example source is what you want. Now, that was easy?

That's with an app server.. I got that working just fine.

No, the example source (not in the article, the link which reads "Example Source") is standalone.

Sorry, it is of course linked in the "Hibernate Examples", not in the "15 Minutes".

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/examples/

Uh, I should wake up before posting. Sorry, we don't have an example for standalone Hibernate usage, because it is actually very easy.

Configure your hibernate.properties or hibernate.cfg.xml with a connection pool (C3P0 is recommended) and do a

SessionFactory sf = new Configuration().configure().buildSessionFactory();

in your main().

I'll just continue to play with it then.