Hibernate Tools is a handy tool for Java’s developers to generate tedious hibernate code easily. I always use the “reverse engineering” feature to generate the model class, hbm or annotation from database tables, it’s fast clean and very easy to use. However , the Hibernate tools installation in Eclipse is quite confusing in Hibernate or JBoss official website, at least to me :) .

Steps of the installation

1) Know your Eclipse & Hibernate Tool version to download

There are different Hibernate tools version specified for a particular Eclipse IDE. Check the Matrix of supported platforms here. From the chart, if you are using Eclipse 3.5/Galileo, you need to download the JBoss Tools 3.1.0

P.S The Hibernate tool is bundle with JBoss tools.

2) Visit the JBoss tool download site

Visit JBoss tool download site.

Here are two options

1) Update Sites – Use Eclipse update site to download it automatically
2) Downloads – Download the zip file and put into Eclipse plugin folder

Personally, i do not like the 1st option, it will download many other stuffs which may not necessary. Let’s choose 2nd option :)

3) Download Hibernate Tools

Click on the JBoss tools version you want to download, and search for Hibernate Tools

P.S Downloaded file name should look like “HibernateTools-3.3.0.v200910281724M-H247-M4.zip”

4) Extract it

Extract it with your favor zip tool

5) Copy to Eclipse plugin & feature folder

Copy the extracted plugin and feature folders to Eclipse’s plugin & feature folders

6) Restart Eclipse, Done

Is Hibernate Tools installed successful?

You can check in the Eclipse perspective , “Windows–>Open Perspective–>Others” , make sure you see the Hibernate icon.

In Hibernate Perspective, you can test the Hibernate tool functionality, if it is not working as expected, make sure you have a correct Eclipse IDE and Hibernate Tool match.

Follow up : How to generate code with Hibernate Tools

This article was posted in Hibernate category.