Sherman,
I think your explanation solved my problem. I tried doing things that way originally, but kept getting the 'persistent class not found' error.
Now tracing back, I realize that the error was due to a missing Manifest.mf Class-Path entry for a jar containing the interface that my Hibernate class was implementing--it compiled fine, but MBean just couldn't find it.
By the way, I was using the tutorial at
http://www.hibernate.org/66.html
The tutorial seems to suggest placing hbm.xml files into a separate 'mapping' directory. That is why I mistakenly strayed down that path.
BTW-here is a DAO example that helped me. Maybe a merging between this example and the tutorial listed above would be good:
http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... ight=jboss
In any case, it should be well structured and leave nothing ambiguous for newbies like me. It would probably save many weeks of start-up development time.
I'm no expert, but I'd gladly volunteer to write something...of course, with all the dumb questions I'd be asking in these forums, it probably wouldn't have much credibility:) Again, I'm just a newbie.
Thanks again and best wishes.