I am a newbee regarding Hibernate and I am looking for the best fitting tools for my development:

I use the following IDE and database:
- NetBeans 5.5 with Visual Web Pack
- SYBASE /iAnywhere Adaptive Server Anywhere 9

I write a web-app that accesses an existing database. I cannot change the db schema. This means I have to perform a reverse engineering to create Java Objects from the schema. The web-frontend will be based on JavaServer Faces.

The question is: What are the recommended tools to perform this reverse engineering? I like to omit to write manually tons of XML files for the ORM.

HibernateTools seem to work with Eclipse but not with NetBeans?

The other question is: Is it recommendable to write the persistence layer in a separate project and include it as library (jar file) into my NetBeans Web project? If so I could use HibernateTools and Eclipse for that.

What is the recommended way of implementing such a web-app? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and experiences made with your projects.
Many thanks.

Thomas

1) Hibernate tools supports Ant to do reverse engineering and code generation. I use Eclipse and still use the Ant tasks as opposed to the plugins (that way I am not tied to an IDE).

2) In my ecperience, jar'ing up the persistence layer is a good way to learn about your classloaders. ;) But really, just keep the persistence layer in a sepearate package and you'll be fine.

3) For web-apps, look at http://www.hibernate.org/43.html , it makes things pretty simple without having to worry about collection initializations, lazy loading issues, etc.