We are in the process of developing a new J2EE web application that is going to be deployed on Websphere 7.
We are going to use Java 6 and hibernate 3.6 for persistence. We will be using JPA annotations for POJOS.My question is what is the ideal architecture for Service Layer/DAO layer when using hibernate.When we used hibernate 5years ago, the design was using spring's hibernate template and spring's hibernate transaction manager. I know there has been some advancements in hibernate and spring in the last five years, which I couldn't keep track. So I'm looking to find the ideal architecture for Service layer/DAO layer. Is Spring a still must have with hibernate. I read somewhere that the latest hiberante has built in feature similar to the spring hibernate template. BTW we will be using Flex for the front end and Granite DS to talk to the Java service layer backend. So we won't be using Spring MVC. Any useful links/documents with sample code will be greatly appreciated.

You don't need spring to use hibernate. You can use Hibernate quite easily on it's own and integrate it into most SOAs:

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/4. ... ew-minimal

The manual is actually quite informative and thorough:

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/4. ... n-US/html/

I do recommend researching annotations over XML for setting up ORMs.

Thanks. What I wanted to avoid was the repetition of the following code in every DAO method to open & close the session and do the transaction management.


Session sess = factory.openSession();
Transaction tx = null;
try {
tx = sess.beginTransaction();

// do some work
...

tx.commit();
}
catch (RuntimeException e) {
if (tx != null) tx.rollback();
throw e; // or display error message
}
finally {
sess.close();
}