I'm migrating to Hibernate 3 and am trying to understand the benefits of utilizing Java 5 Annotations versus XDoclet for Hibernate mappings.

Since annotations can be included and read an runtime, it could be inferred that Hibernate XML Mappings (HBM.XML files) are no longer necessary. Do the Hibernate annotations replace HBM.XML files completely, or are the HBM.XML files generated from the annotations?

If the files are still generated, how do I accomplish this once all my source is annotated? Is there another Ant task I should look into?

Thank you for any and all help.

The annotations can stand alone. Annotated code does not generate HBMs to operate correctly. The annotation binder does its work to populate a configuration class (as does the HBM and the JDBC binder). There are examples to getting annotated POJOs working correctly. Hope this helps.

Thank you, David. That's an excellent idea to have the classes stand alone.

As a follow up question, does the Eclipse Console Tool for Hibernate 3 support these classes with annotations? In other words, for my "hibernate.cfg.xml" file, do I reference the non-existant HBM.XML files, or the annotated classes themselves?

the console does not have support for loading annotated classes yet. it will get it.

Thank you for the reply, Max.

For archives, the console version at the time of this post is Hibernate Tools 3.0 alpha 1.