I am new to hibernate, and I was wondering if anyone knew of any diagrams or tutorials that explain the hibernate process of storing data to a database.

Something along the lines of:
1. User clicks save
2. Data is saved to Java variables
3. Hibernate is invoked by ... ?
4. Hibernate checks the Classname.hbm.xml file for the object mapping
5. Hibernate makes a call to the configured database (configured in hibernate.cfg.xml)
6. Hibernate returns ... ?

...

I have looked around, but my searches have not turned up anything as of yet. If you could, please provide a helpful link or modify the guess of a process above.

Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated!

Here's a little tutorial I put together that tries to explain how Hibernate works, and to a certain extent, what is going on under the covers:

http://jpa.ezhibernate.com/Javacode/learn.jsp?tutorial=07howhibernateworks

Give it a read, and see if it can generate any more specific questions.

If you want, you can always download the Hibernate source and simply step through the code. Of course, sometimes that fine grained a knowledge isn't always helpful.

Concentrate on what's important, learn how Hibernate works, and then start employing this powerful ORM tool!