Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

1.3. Setting Up a Project Hierarchy

Although we're going to start small, once we start designing data structures and building Java classes and database tables that represent them, along with all the configuration and control files to glue them together and make useful things happen, we're going to end up with a lot of files. So let's start out with a good organization from the beginning. As you'll see in this process, between the tools you've downloaded and their supporting libraries, there are already a significant number of files to organize.

1.1.1. Why do I care?

If you end up building something cool by following the examples in this book, and want to turn it into a real application, you'll be in good shape from the beginning. More to the point, if you set things up the way we describe here, the commands and instructions we give you throughout the examples will make sense and actually work. Many examples also build on one another throughout the book, so it's important to get on the right track from the beginning.

If you want to skip ahead to a later example, or just avoid typing some of the longer sample code and configuration files, you can download "finished" versions of the chapter examples from the book's web site. These downloads will all be organized as described here.

1.1.2. How do I do that?

Here's how:

1. Pick a location on your hard drive where you want to play with Hibernate, and create a new folder, which we'll refer to from now on as your project directory.

2. Move into that ...