Hibernate 4 Maven Plugin - A simple Plugin for generating a Database-Schema from Hibernate 4 Mapping-Annotations.

hibernate4-maven-plugin is a plugin for generating a database-schema from your Hibernate-4-Mappings and create or update your database accordingly. Its main usage is to automatically create and populate a test-database for unit-tests in cooperation with the dbunit-maven-plugin.

The plugin was designed with three main goals in mind:

• It should be easy to use.
• It should be maximal unlikely, to erase a producation-database by accident.
• It should not slow down the development cycle.

To achieve the first goal, the convention-over-configuration paradigma was applied and the plugin was stuffed with usefull logging-messages. So, if in doubt, just turn on the debugging output with the mvn -X ....

To achieve the second goal, the precedence in which the configuration locations are consulted was layouted in a way that makes it possible, to prevent overwrites of the wrong database by accident.

Last but not least, in order to not slow down the development cycle, the hibernate4-maven-plugin only executes the schema-export, if the mapping or the dialect changes (or if you force it to do so).

For more information about the inspiration to write this tiny plugin, read our blog-article about the hibernate4-maven-plugin.