I am just starting out with hibernate.

If I do not have any code, data design, database, nothing at all....
Should I create a hbml file and generate stuff from there, or should I code my java classes and generate from there?

I feel that I would rather start with a hbml file and let that drive my ddl and java creation.

Sound okay?
Thanks.

Sounds fine. Hibernate is flexible and building middle out is a fine approached. It was the favoured approach before XDoclet but many users prefer to work that way. If you later find you want to work bottom up (Middlegen) or top down (XDoclet) you can do so.