Integration and Configuration of Hibernate

You do not have to run Hibernate inside any particular J2EE container or
framework—Hibernate 3 only requires Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 1.3 or greater,
although the new Annotations feature requires J2SE 5.0 (or later).
The Hibernate distribution
includes a large set of libraries which you need to place on your application’s classpath. You can call Hibernate [...]

Advantages of Hibernate

Advantages of Hibernate:

Hibernate does not require you to map one POJO to one table. A POJO can be constructed
out of a selection of table columns, or several POJOs can be persisted into a single table.
Hibernate directly supports inheritance relationships and the various other relationships
between classes.
Hibernate persistence has no requirement for a J2EE application server or [...]

Hibernate – ERROR LazyInitializationException – could not initialize proxy – no Session

Hmm, how many times have I seen this while learning how to use Hibernate? Too many.
When you load an object defined with an Object-Relational (O/R) mapping in Hibernate, eg. you run a SELECT in your HQL, hibernate retrieves that object but does not, by default, load the whole object graph of any associated objects ie. [...]