Folks,
yes, I know, there is a wiki page for that, and I've found it informative and useful but...

...today I had a 3 hours meeting which has KILLED myself, where a consultant from a major italian consulting company has shown a very strong opposition to a spring + hibernate solution (against EJB + plain JDBC!), saying things such as "I've talked to XXX from Gartner group, and he said he has no information about big projects running on hibernate, not even small ones, to say the least".

So: I'm trying to advocate hibernate (which I'm using these days, and which of course find very good), but I need data to definitely force those people to shut up. The wiki page is a good start, but I need more.

I've read a lot of posts around telling that hibernate and jboss are deployed at fortune yyy companies, but none of those posts were talking about size of projects, and so on. So I ask you:

1) could someone of you post me some information more? publicly on this forum could be useful for everyone, but if the info is "semi-reserved" I swear I'll never tell it anyone (and especially write about it!) except the people I need to convince. Uhm... no need to say that some Fortune XYZ company name could help.

2) wouldn't a page with "sizings" for hibernate projects be useful on the site? I mean, number of users, number of machines, architecture for the deployment, 3rd party experiences are a good thing, but I think that if Gavin, Christian and the other hibernate developers wrote something about THEIR hibernate projects (which I suppose being often pretty important) this could immensely help advocating efforts such as mine...

Thanks for every answer...

Unfortunately, it is not easy getting big companies to stand up and speak for you/us. We are trying hard _right now_ to get some companies with good projects to stand up for Hibernate and tell everyone about their experience.

They really exist, it's just not easy to get that information (and the approvals).

Speaking of our own projects: We have been focusing on Hibernate and Hibernate support for the last 10 months, so we (at least I) don't have any current projects to show, only other people's (see problems above). I guess the same is true for Gavin.

So we need everyone's help with that: if you think your boss likes Hibernate, get in contact with us so we can compile the information. Just send me an email and I'll get back to you.

Expect something soon, I just got an email with another reference!

As a marketing guy, I generally stay silent on Forums. But Christian asked me to post a reply so I assume it's alright now :)

To answer the original question and to expand on Christian's answer, we are currently working with two companies (and potentially two more soon) that are using Hibernate in order to write up case studies that talk about their implementations, why they chose Hibernate, why it was a better choice for them than EJB or JDO and so on. One of the primary motivations behind them is to help everyone that finds themselves in the same situation as you - where they need 'help' convincing the powers-that-be that Hibernate is not only the right technical choice but also the safe choice. These case studies would be posted on the Hibernate.org website as soon as they are completed and approved by the reference company. I'm not sure yet when the first one will be available but I would expect in the next week or two. We'll continue to add references over time.

Your e-mail address is not posted so I could not reach you directly. I would be more than happy to send you the completed case studies directly as soon as they are approved. If you are interested, please send me an e-mail (joe@jboss.com).

Lastly, I would like to encourage others in the Hibernate community to share your successes with us. Being a reference for Hibernate can be as simple as providing us a quote to use on the Web or being interviewed for a case study. In some cases, for those that are interested, we will involve users in various press or analyst briefings. This can help to also gain attention for your company, your project, and hopefully for you as well.

Regards,

Joe McGonnell
Director of Marketing
JBoss, Inc.
joe@jboss.com

There is a reference page for companies using Hibernate already, http://www.hibernate.org/113.html. It is disappointing how few post there are (13). I was denied approval to list the company I'm currently contracting at. I wish more folks who can get approvals, or don't need them would provide posts.

<rant> Most Fortune 1000 company's, at least the one's I know of here in Florida are behind the times and either just now starting to use EJB or use EJB because Sun says to. I know one senior IT manager who thinks J2EE is the same thing as EJB! I have had countless job opportunities here only to find that the IT standard for persistence is EJB. Perhaps things are changing though. I am very exited about Orlando JUG meeting this month featuring Keith Donald (Spring developer). </rant>

What's this rant have to due with the topic at hand? I've used Hibernate on 2 projects at this large, international energy company, both times "under cover." Perhaps many folks have to bring in Hibernate like this, through the back door? You think this is the case? On the second one, I waited until development was complete before "comming clean" about Hibernate and Spring. I didn't get in trouble only because I was able to complete development of an application w/ 13 db tables in 24 days. Which leads me to my last point. Why isn't anyone talking about this angle?

A couple of us here compiled some metrics and found that Spring + Hibernate + a services oriented architecture using domain models resulted in 50% LESS CODE than similar applications using JDBC and/or stored procedures. One use case in my 13 table application reads or writes from all 13 tables. This took a grand total of SEVEN lines of code, thanks to Hibernate & Spring. I was able to add 15 JVM level object/collection caches that improved performance 90% WITHOUT adding a line of code. Actually, I did have to add a setCacheable(true) to the queries. Persistence services at the object/set level, disconnected object graphs, Hibernate query & JVM caches, no singletons or factories and declarative transaction management saves a lot of time.

I hoping someday soon I'll retrieve the approval I need to document these experiences. Wish me luck,

Jeff

I'd like to thank those guys who have stepped up already, it is very helpful. And again, if you are using Hibernate, and if its possible to help us out in some of the ways Joe has described - and especially if you work for a well-known company (you know who you are!) - please contact Joe or myself.

I get many private emails similar to the original post in this thread and it is kinda embarrassing to not have an adequate answer. (I do not ever tell anyone about specific projects that I know of unless I have explicit permission!)

Nevertheless, the page is useful, I've contacted a couple of people about giving further references.



Marc and I are doing a JUG tour in June, not sure if Orlando is on the list.




This kind of metrics is really useful. Actually, we need to start talking about the time-saving aspect of Hibernate, which has never really been something we've pushed hard on.

I repeat,
Auchan International is using (www.auchan.com), since march 2003, Hibernate for all this wep Apps.

Today we have a great challenge, the bigger project we have (thousands development days) will use Hibernate.
My manager said to Gavin (and JBoss Marketing) we are ok to be an official customer and personnaly i think it's normal, more than a great tool, hibernate team (and many users) is helping via the excellent doc and forum.


Anthony

Ok, thanks to all: I have contacted via email the people which have contributed to the "who uses hibernate" page: most of them have answered with very long messages and a lot of details more, both about their projects and their personal experience with hibernate. I have collected all the opinions in a document with short summaries (in italian...): as soon as I have the time I'll post a summary with the most meaningful quotes.

In the meanwhile, every piece of information more about hibernate success stories is greatly appreciated: if someone has one and wants to share it on a "private-confidential" basis (i.e.: one that will help me advocate hibernate in my internal meetings) I can be contacted at "immanuel (at) nightly (dot) com".

Keep up the good work: I hope I'll be able to contribute soon with a new success story for the system we are building, here in Milan, Italy.