Transactional services / Spring integration
Service classes or methods should be marked @Transactional to provide access to the underlying Hibernate Session / SessionFactory.
NamedQuery
Frequently executed HQL queries should be specified in @NamedQueryS on the relevant persistent entity/bean. The hibernate DAOs then reference the appropriate NamedQuery within their methods.
Useful tools
To run HQL queries and inspect the hibernate setup within Eclipse you can install the hibernate tools Eclipse plugin from JBoss by adding this update site to your Eclipse plugins registry (under Help -> Software Updates) - http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development
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