Java Persistence with Hibernate

4.1. Understanding entities and value types

Entities are persistent types that represent first-class business objects (the term object is used here in its natural sense). In other words, some of the classes and types you have to deal with in an application are more important, which naturally makes others less important. You probably agree that in CaveatEmptor, Item is a more important class than String. User is probably more important than Address. What makes something important? Let's look at the issue from a different perspective.

4.1.1. Fine-grained domain models

A major objective of Hibernate is support for fine-grained domain models, which we isolated as the most important requirement for a rich domain model. It's one reason why we work ...