So far you have seen how Hibernate uses XML mapping file for the transformation of data from POJO to database tables and vice versa. Hibernate annotations is the newest way to define mappings without a use of XML file. You can use annotations in addition to or as a replacement of XML mapping metadata.

Hibernate Annotations is the powerful way to provide the metadata for the Object and Relational Table mapping. All the metadata is clubbed into the POJO java file along with the code this helps the user to understand the table structure and POJO simultaneously during the development.

If you going to make your application portable to other EJB 3 compliant ORM applications, you must use annotations to represent the mapping information but still if you want greater flexibility then you should go with XML-based mappings.

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