Please excuse my ignore ...

I am having some problems differentiating the difference between the 2. Can somebody give me a clear explanations?

If I want to map a master detail table relationship like order and order_details, what kind of mapping do i use? is it collection mapping? Then are what example use of association mapping?

Thanks
james

James..
Perhaps this is not the right forum to start with. :)
Just go through the hibernate docs - it has some exhaustive notes around Mappings and associations.

Collection is a collection (surprise!) of elements: a set, a map, a bag etc.

Association is a association between entities (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, etc)

So

Order has an collection called "details", which should be accesed using something like:

Order order;
order.getDetails() ; //Set, for example

At the same time, there is an Association between Order and OrderDetails:

<class name="Order">
<set name="details"> <--------- this is the Collection
<key column="id_order">
<one-to-many class="OrderDetail"/> <-------- this is the association
</set>