Java Hibernate Cookbook

Chapter 3. Basic Annotations

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Declaring a class as an entity and creating a table in the database – @Entity and @Table
• Creating a column in the table – @Column
• Creating a primary key and composite primary key column – @Id and @IdClass
• Creating an autogenerator column

Introduction

Annotation is used to provide a metadata of code. It is a part of the code file itself. It is used to give some extra information about the code and can be used with variables, method packages, the interface, or the class itself.

The advantages of annotation are that it's easy to use and makes the development process faster. Before annotation was introduced, there were many methodologies which were used to provide information ...