I am new to learning Spring. I will be probably using Spring for both Rest API and WebApplications. I am getting quite confused at the difference between using JPA and Hibernate. Hibernate seems to be hassle to configure with Spring ? Would it be better to focus on learning JPA, Hibernate or Both.
Kind Regards
As @NimChimpsky mentioned, Hibernate is one of implementations of JPA (Java Persistence API).
Well, I can tell from my experience that configuring Hibernate + Spring is not so difficult. For example, my applicationContext.xml contains:
<!-- My datasource -->
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean" scope="singleton">
<property name="jndiName">
<value>java:/MY_APPLICATION</value>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.cache.provider_class">org.hibernate.cache.internal.NoCachingRegionFactory</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>
</props>
</property>
<property name="mappingResources">
<list>
<value>path/to/my/package/Test.hbm.xml</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
Then I simply autowire SessionFactory in my DAOs and that's it.
So, personally I would vote for Hibernate :)
Interesting tutorial about Hibernate 4 and Spring 3.x: http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/05/hibernate-4-with-spring.html
P.S. My pom.xml contains the following dependencies:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-tx</artifactId>
<version>3.2.4.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-orm</artifactId>
<version>3.2.4.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
<version>3.2.4.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
<version>4.2.6.Final</version>
</dependency>
P.P.S. Well, my post is quite messy. But my bottom line is: learn Hibernate and Spring + Hibernate is easy to setup.
jpa is the standard, hibernate an implementation of. Go with JPA. And use spring-data, so you don't have to do as much programming.
I would prefer hibernate because once you are familiar with this then you wont find any difficulty with JPA. Hibernate is comparatively harder but worth learning.
