I am embarking on my first application to use SLSBs (and the first to use Hibernate). The application has a remote client only, so there will be no web tier. What I am confused about is what is the correct way to initialize Hibernate (or anything else for that matter). Normally I would throw all the stuff that needed to be initialized into a start-up servlet, but since there is no web tier it seems like I shouldn't do it that way. The examples that I found either implied that you should call Hibernate.configure() in every bean, which seems wasteful, or just tells you to pull the SessionFactory out of JNDI without out explaing how to get it in there in the first place.

Set a name for the SessionFactory in your hibernate.cfg.xml, call configure() once, it is then availabe with that name in JNDI. Most applications have some kind of startup class, there is no rule here.