nHibernate 1.02

NHibernate for .NET

Project Lead:	Sergey Koshcheyev
Contributors:	Mike Doerfler, Peter Smulovics, Pierre Henri Kuaté,
	Paul Hatcher, Kevin Williams, and others
Latest release:	1.0.2 (What's New) (Road Map)
Release date:	15.01.2006
Requirements:	.NET Framework 1.1 or 2.0

NHibernate is a port of Hibernate Core for Java to the .NET Framework. It handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database. Given an XML description of your entities and relationships, NHibernate automatically generates SQL for loading and storing the objects. Optionally, you can describe your mapping metadata with attributes in your source code.

NHibernate supports transparent persistence, your object classes don't have to follow a restrictive programming model. Persistent classes do not need to implement any interface or inherit from a special base class. This makes it possible to design the business logic using plain .NET (CLR) objects and object-oriented idiom.

Being a port of Hibernate 2.1, the NHibernate API is very similar to that of Hibernate. All Hibernate knowledge and existing Hibernate documentation is therefore directly applicable to NHibernate. Take a look at the list of Differences between Hibernate and NHibernate for a detailed comparison of Hibernate for Java and .NET or browse the available NHibernate Documentation.

NHibernate key features:

• Natural programming model - NHibernate supports natural OO idiom; inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the .NET collections framework

• Native .NET - NHibernate API uses .NET conventions and idioms.

• Support for fine-grained object models - a rich variety of mappings for collections and dependent objects

• No build-time bytecode enhancement - there's no extra code generation or bytecode processing steps in your build procedure

• The query options - NHibernate addresses both sides of the problem; not only how to get objects into the database, but also how to get them out again

• Support for "conversations" - NHibernate supports long-lived persistence contexts, detach/reattach of objects, and takes care of optimistic locking automatically

• Free/open source - NHibernate is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License)

The optional NHibernate Contrib package provides tools, additional mapping types, and cache providers