HibernateTemplate vs HibernateDaoSupport vs SessionFactory Injection

Question

I have seen in lot of forums and still in confusion. We are starting a new project with Spring 3.1 & Hibernate 4 and need to decide which strategy to use for Hibernate with

Answer 1

If you must use Hibernate, your best bet is to ignore Code Ranch (and SO) and follow the recommendation from Spring:

http://blog.springsource.org/2012/04/06/migrating-to-spring-3-1-and-hibernate-4-1/

Answer 2

Now SessionFactory is recomended for Hibernate 4 for open/close connection automatically. So no need to use HibernateTemplate class.

Answer 3

Spring itself recommends not using HibernateTemplate anymore, in the javadoc of the class. You can declare the session factory as a Spring bean directly, inject it as any other Spring bean in your own components, and use the native Hibernate API directly (using sessionFactory.getCurrentSession()).