I have looked all over for the answer to this and can't find a straightforward answer. Is it possible to use Hibernate Annotations with Hibernate 3.1 and Java 5 without anything from EJB3? This

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/annot ... e/en/html/

has a section named "Mapping with EJB3 Annotations" and the Hibernate Annotations download contains a file ejb3-persistence.jar.

So, can someone straighten this out for me? How tied together are Hibernate Annotations and EJB3? And what do I need in order to just have a web application that runs in Tomcat and uses Hibernate and Java 5 annotations to persist data to a database?
Thanks,
-M@

The EJB3 spec defines persistence annotations. H implements this standard. EJB3 works outside of an EJB container, so do not get shy about the jar name ... it will run in tomcat, or a command line java app written in vi. There are H specific annotations that go beyond the spec as well.

So I can just go ahead and use all of the annotations mentioned in the Hibernate Annotations documentation and that'll work for standalone Hibernate?
And, is the Hibernate Entity Manager only for use with an EJB container?
Thanks for clearing this up.
-M@

You can use entity manager outside of a container, or you can persist objects directly through H.

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/entit ... cture.html

Yes, you can use Hibernate Annotations without Hibernate EntityManager. You can also use HA and HEM outside of JBoss EJB3.

Okay, so it looks to me like J2EE has gone through a significant change since version 1.3. That version required an EJB container to persist objects to the database. Now it looks like J2EE can be used more like a library, so the application can sit on top of EJB3 without running inside a container, or you can run a container that uses EJB3 to persist data on behalf of the application.
Is that correct?
Thanks again,
-M@

Right, this has been our long-term vision for a while now.