Hi -
I was wondering if there was anyway to get hibernate to operate against data stored in xml files (at least in a limited way).

(I realize hibernate is an oRm tool, where the 'r' is relational, but...)

Why would I want to do this? 1) leverage hibernate mappings to define and xml mapping 2) treat my data access abstraction a single way whether the session is connected to a real db or an xml file.

One option I found was a commercial JDBC driver that reads/writes to xml files. Some sort of mapping is required. Then I guess a hibernate dialect would be needed for that jdbc driver.

I'm hoping for an easier solution. I'd be willing to write an XML dialect if that were possible, but glancing at org.hib.dialect.Dialect, it looks very SQL oriented and maybe not possibly w/o extensive hackery.

From what I read about the XML mapping in hibernate is that converts results from a real DB into XML elements, which is not what I'm looking for.

HIbernate is able to do it.
please read:

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... l/xml.html

No, that is quite different. As I mentioned above this is not what I want.

The xml mappings stuff allows you to read or write XML "pojos" to a database. I want the "database" to be xml.

"You can write queries that retrieve dom4j trees from the database and have any modification you make to the tree automatically synchronized to the database."

Essentially, I'm looking for something like a hibernate driver for castor, or xmlbeans.