Chapter 1. Overview
Applications that act on data are a fundamental of computer science. Historically, these applications have been written in wide variety of programming languages, with an equally wide variety of storage mechanisms for the data. Over time, programming languages evolved to use an essentially hierarchical model (part of the suite of advancements encompassed by object-oriented development). In comparison, the most popular form of reasonably scalable data storage is the relational databasea tables, columns, and rows model. Developers wind up developing systems to bridge two worldsthe hierarchical world of a modern programming language and the tabular world of relational databases. The goal of Hibernate is to dramatically reduce the time and energy you spend maintaining this bridge without losing the power and flexibility associated with the two worlds.
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