HibernateTemplate vs HibernateDaoSupport vs SessionFactory Injection

Question

I have seen in lot of forums and still in confusion. We are starting a new project with Spring 3.1 & Hibernate 4 and need to decide which strategy to use for Hibernate with Spring:

1. Accessing Hibernate directly

   Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession(); session.beginTransaction();

2. Using HibernateTemplate

   List bb = (List)hibernateTemplate.find("from Entity");

3. Using HibernateDAOSupport classes

   List bb =(List)getHibernateTemplate().find("from Entity");

Can you please help what should i use? I have read from CodeRanch and one another link which tell that from Hibernate 3.x onwards we should inject SessionFactory in our DAO Classes(using @Repository).

Can someone explain this in detail?

Regards,

Arun Kumar

Answer 1

Spring itself recommends not using HibernateTemplate anymore, in the javadoc of the class. You can declare the session factory as a Spring bean directly, inject it as any other Spring bean in your own components, and use the native Hibernate API directly (using sessionFactory.getCurrentSession()).