one of the faqs is

Where can I see the hbm.xml files generated from the Annotations?

and this is the reply

You can't. The annotations are building the internal Hibernate metadata model without any indermediate xml file.

Can we access this model programmatically (is it publicly available) and is there any program that can persist the same to xml (eventhough no xml version is generated in between)?

Evenwhen I am not using annotations I would like to know all the defaults that hibernate has assumed.

thanks,
Nishant

the tools.hibernate.org can dump annotation to hbm.xml (but it does not dump out *all* conceivable models yet..contributions welcome)

And the metadata is available in the Configuration/AnnotationConfiguration object.