I've caught the TDD (Test Driven Development) bug. TDD has been very helpful for me in adding new functionality to legacy applications. I'm now facing the prospect of a "from scratch" application where neither the data nor object model is fleshed out.

Left to my own devices, I'd probably do a full specification of the data model before starting out and then use TDD to inplement the features and slowly grow the needed object model. However thats not really following TDD. I'm still learning Hibernate, but it looks like it, and its supporting tools, should support a fairly lean process for growing both the data and object model incrementatly.

Does anyone have any advice or experiences to share in this arena?

TDD is great in a top-down apporach

Hibernate, XDoclet, and HSQLDB can provide a very nice standalone test platform for developing mapped objects, mappings, and data access objects. I've used this successfully to do a form of TDD in my current project at work. The side benefit is that there are unit tests for the DAOs that are standalone (i.e. they don't require an app server to be running).

I do use HSQLDB too until I play with Tx at the EJB level. It is a huge time saver.

Thanks for the pointers, once my current frustration with Java cools down a little I'll give those tools a try. (Frustration isn't due to Hibernate... just problems getting different tools/IDEs/packages to work together nicely)

Eric