I want to use Hibernate in a Swing application. I try to keep sessions open as short as possible, but when should I call close() on my instance of SessionFactory? Right after closing my sessions or at application shutdown?

A SessionFactory is (relatively) expensive to create so you should keep it as long as you have need for it. In other words, you should not close it until your application is shutting down.

Thanks for your reply. From what I observe, building/configuring a SessionFactory is expensive (so I do this only once). Calling sessionFactory.close(), however, does not seem to result in all that work being done again. For example, I can still call openSession() on my closed factory and do not notice a slower response of my GUI. So what does close() actually do?

Oh... I have never tried that. I have always assumed that a session factory would be unusable after closing it. Why do you want to close and continue to use it?

From what I read, there are good reasons to close a session when you're done. I just wondered whether the same is true for a sessionFactory. What happens if a user keeps my Swing application open for several hours?