I noticed that the HibernateUtil class in the newest edition of Caveat emptor no longer contains openSession, closeSession, beginTransaction, and commitTransaction methods, relegating it to the individual action classes to get from the sessionFactory.

What was the motivation behind that?

yes, I am quite familiar with those patterns. but while implementing session-in-view, why not invoke those methods from HibernateUtil, as it used to be in the past

Please re-read the page again. There is no need anymore for a complex HibernateUtil in 3.1, this is all built-in.

Thanks, I reread it. More importantly, I looked at the code. So, yes, that part makes sense now - the SessionFactrory.getCurrentSession is doing all that, for example.

Now, I have a follow up question. That page explains that transaction.commit() also closes the session. Now, I looked through the code and was unable to figure out where it does that. Can you shed some light on this for me?

ThreadLocalSessionContext.java