http://www.hibernate.org/
Working with object-oriented software and a relational database can be cumbersome and time consuming in todays
enterprise environments. Hibernate is an object/relational mapping tool for Java environments. The term
object/relational mapping (ORM) refers to the technique of mapping a data representation from an object model
to a relational, SQL-based structure.
Hibernate not only takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables, but also provides data query
and retrieval facilities and can significantly reduce development time otherwise spent with manual data handling
in SQL and JDBC. Hibernates goal is to relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence
related programming tasks.