Building a SessionFactory

First, we will discuss SessionFactory and how to create it in detail. As the name suggests, a SessionFactory is a factory of sessions.

A SessionFactory has the following features:

• It's an interface implemented using the singleton pattern.
• It's created using the configuration provided by the configuration file.
• It's thread-safe, so it's created once during the application's lifetime, and multiple users or threads can access it at the same time without any concurrency issue.
• As a SessionFactory object is immutable, changes made to the configuration will not affect the existing factory object.
• It's a factory class, and its main duty is to create, manage, and retrieve a session on request. A Session is used to get a physical connectivity with the database.

How to do it…

If you are using a version of hibernate that is earlier than 4, use the following code to create a SessionFactory:

/* Line 1 */ Configuration cfg = new Configuration();
...