I have an application which has been in production for about half a year.
Technical specifications:
* Weblogic 8.1 SP4 on a unix box
* Oracle 9i
* Existing persistence layer is implemented using JDBC encapsulated in DAO
classes.

I've recently looked into incorporating Hibernate into this application (3.1.3).
I've played with Hibernate before on my free time and it seemed to
offer a lot. I've overcame some problems when integrating with Weblogic and
was able to save and load objects successfully.

I'm currently assessing the advantages and disadvantages.
Complete refactoring of the existing JDBC code is unlikely to occur in the
near future. If we are to add more than 5 tables, I think that introducing Hibernate will be worthwhile. Though I don't forsee an special problems, aside from a small learning curve, I wanted to know whether somebody has done this before and can offer tips (if any). For example, are there any issues with Oracle and Hibernate? Any feedback from *personal* experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi,
i have developed 1 smaller and 2 large scale applications using Hibernate. Two of them were migrated from other persistence technologies to Hibernate.

From my personal experience I would say that you should not face major problems with your app since the combination of hibernate and oracle happens quite often in enterprise applications.

But you should bear in mind that the learning curve of hibernate is easy with the first steps (standard mappings, standard architecture,...) but as soon as you face some problems that aren't straightforward to solve you will not get very far with a superficial knowledge of hibernate. I have seen this happen to myself a few times ;-) So maybe you should allocate some buffering time to the move to hibernate.

But from a stability point of view hibernate is certainly a good choice.

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I agree with you. There is the easy stuff you do with Hibernate. But when it comes to relations or different strategy for retrieving object graphs, although not rocket science, will take some time at first. Though I have read "Hibernate In Action", it was a long time ago and I never had experience with it on the job.