I wrote a really simple application at work last quarter, and this quarter it needs to be rewritten with a bunch of new features. Rather than doing things the same old way, I’m going to use Hibernate for persistence, and rather than writing a bunch of mapping files, I’ve decided to employ XDoclet to save myself some labor. Unfortunately, picking up both of these technologies at once is seeming a bit daunting to me. Not in terms of how they work, which is perfectly clear to me, but getting to the point where I have a piece of running code that proves I have everything from build to deployment set up properly is a bit trying. My hope is that the time I’m investing up front will pay big dividends later. I’m ready to join the camp of “I’m not writing SQL any more” Java developers.