Spring Framework with Hibernate

How to integrate Spring Framework with Hibernate?

In the world of Java development, combining the power of Spring Framework with the flexibility of Hibernate has become a common practice for building enterprise-grade applications. This integration allows developers to leverage the features of both frameworks to achieve better scalability, maintainability, and efficiency in their projects. In this article, we will explore the process of integrating Spring Framework with Hibernate, discussing key concepts, benefits, and best practices along the way.

Overview of Spring Framework and Hibernate

• Spring Framework: Spring is a powerful and lightweight framework for building Java applications. It provides comprehensive infrastructure support for developing Java applications, including dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, and transaction management.
• Hibernate: Hibernate is a popular object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for Java. It simplifies the process of mapping Java objects to database tables and vice versa, allowing developers to work with database data in an object-oriented manner.

Setting Up the Project

1. Create a new Spring Boot project using your preferred IDE or by using Spring Initializr ( https://start.spring.io/ ).
2. Add dependencies for Spring Web, Spring Data JPA, and H2 Database to your project’s `pom.xml` or `build.gradle`.

Define Entity Classes

1. We will fetch from the students’ table which is as follows

2. Create entity classes as shown in the below code.
3. Annotate the entity classes with JPA annotations such as `@Entity`, `@Id`, `@GeneratedValue`, etc., to define the database schema as shown in the code below. We can refer to the below class from: Student.java

Create Repository Interfaces

1. Create repository interfaces by extending the JpaRepository interface provided by Spring Data JPA.
2. We can Define custom query methods in the repository interfaces to perform CRUD operations on the entities or use default methods provided by hibernate as shown in the below image.
3. Click here to see/copy the code: StudentRepo.java

Implement Service Layer

1. Create service classes to encapsulate the business logic.
2. Inject repository instances into the service classes and implement methods to perform CRUD operations.
3. Please refer to the service class from here: StudentService.java

Implement Controller Layer

1. Create controller classes to handle incoming HTTP requests.
2. Inject service instances into the controller classes and define request mapping methods to handle CRUD operations.
3. Please refer to the controller class from here: StudentController.java

Configure Database Connection

1. Configure the database connection properties in the `application.properties` file.
2. Specify the JDBC URL, username, password, and other necessary configurations as follows.

Run the Application

1. Build the project using Maven or Gradle.
2. Run the application using the `java -jar` command or directly from your IDE.
3. Access the application in your web browser and test the functionality.

-A blog by Shwetali Khambe