Hi all;
I am relatively new to hibernate. I was reading the book and saw that you can have user types, of arbitrary classes, saved by hibernate. I was thinking why would not one use a component which also allows for saving any arbitrary class? I tried java.io.File and the only problem I got was the file does not implement a default constructor. I created a dummy File class with same attribute but with default constructor and it seems to be working.

My question is that: besides constructor, getter and setters, what other reasons are there to create a UserType and not use <component> ?
Thanks

Well, Hibernate is really just about object-relational mappings. So, the idea is to just create your Java classes as you normally would, and then map them. There's really no need to complicate things beyond that.