Have POJOs.
Have DB Schema.
Want to generate Hibernate mappings.
Would love for there to be a nice (=easy enough for a sysadmin or dba to use) GUI for setting these up and (more importantly) maintaining these. I looked at Middlegen, but I'm not sure if it would even do this (it's documentation is amazingly bad), plus there's no way I'm going to ask a sysadmin/dba type person to use Ant...

I'm an IntelliJ user, and the Hibernate plugin did not seem capable of doing this either. Plus it seemed to want all objects in the schema to have the same UID (I'm sure this is not actually the case, but again the documentation is so non-existent and the UI seemed to imply this.)

Thanks!

Bottom up development usualy uses Middlegen to generate the mappings and the hbm2java to generate the POJOs.
Top down would normally use XDoclet markup in the POJOs to generate the mappings then schema export to generate the database.

Middle out is hbm2java and schema export but you don't have the mappings to start with.

You can also manually maintain the mappings aswell. The XML is designed to me easily readable and maintained as it stands - this is how we did it in the beginning.

The DBA will need to make sure database, mappings and POJOs are in sync. I would feel uncomfortable giving this job to multiple people without a responsiple person to review it. Someone that can do that should have no trouble with Middlegen.

What are the issues with the Middlegen documentation? Basic it is true but there is enough to get started. We have examples for getting started, multiple example applications and setups, and plently of uses using the tool so you can ask questions here (in tools forum). There is also the main Middlegen site which has some documentation. Obviously your feedback is valuable as well as your help to improve the situation.

Thanks for quoting the FAQ for me, I RTFM too :-)

My real question is not really about development, it's about maintenance. This is a place where I think Hibernate can add value to something. Speeding up initial development is nice, but maintenance is the gold ring. I have used Middlegen to generate mapping files, and there are numerous tools (including hbm2java) to generate POJOs from a db schema. Something that manages both things in the middle is what I was hoping for. If you tell a large IT org that "with this tool you can use a GUI to map new columns you add to your schema directly to properties on the business object your applications are using" then they will have a big smile and an open wallet. However, I guess re-generating the whole darn thing all the time can work too.

Thanks anyways.