Hi, my team is moving to hibernate and we all new to it. I have bumped into a number of tutorials and have learned the basics on hibernate mappings, sessions, and implementing DAO. My colleague had to join in this learning curve and the first application he came across is Caveat Emptor from Java Persistence with Hibernate. I loaded this app in eclipse and had a look at it. It really looks good but rather complex for beginners. It doesn't seem to be using HibernateUtils class which already provide the business model for all DAO classes. Neither does it use Session factory. I noticed a use of GenericDao class and CatergoryDao, this all could be a little confusing ... Do you recommend this project for people like us to start with, or even write efficient large applications? How are transactions managed on this project? I liked the Spring HibernateTamplate but we not using spring framework.