Why Hibernate with Flex Data Services 2?

FDS 2 does not come without a learning curve, especially for those of us new to the Java world. I've been trying to find a way to speed things up, and at first I kind of ignored the whole Hibernate side of the equation. But eventually I got curious and I have to say, after tinkering around extensively... I'm pretty excited.

Hibernate has some pretty cool plugin tools for Eclipse/Flexbuilder . With these tools you can reverse-engineer all your hibernate xml mapping files and even the java object classes. What that means is that you can just focus on getting your db design done, and the tools will do the rest. Flex Data Services comes with the HibernateAssembler class, and with it they've done all the java coding for you. At least enough to get you started. What's even better is that in the fds2\resources\camples\assemblers, Adobe has thrown in the source code, so down the line you can modify and enhance it as needed.

In the end, all you need is a database with an Employee table, the hibernate.cfg.xml, the samples/crm/Employee.java and the samples/crm/Employee.hbm.xml files for the HibernateAssembler to work. Create the destinations in your data-management-config.xml and away you go - no Java required!