Create session factory in Hibernate 4

Yes, they have deprecated the previous buildSessionFactory API, and it's quite easy to do well.. you can do something like this..

EDIT : ServiceRegistryBuilder is deprecated. you must use StandardServiceRegistryBuilder

public void testConnection() throws Exception {

            logger.info("Trying to create a test connection with the database.");
            Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
            configuration.configure("hibernate_sp.cfg.xml");
            StandardServiceRegistryBuilder ssrb = new StandardServiceRegistryBuilder().applySettings(configuration.getProperties());
            SessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory(ssrb.build());
            Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();
            logger.info("Test connection with the database created successfuly.");
    }

For more reference and in depth detail, you can check the hibernate's official test case at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/master/hibernate-testing/src/main/java/org/hibernate/testing/junit4/BaseCoreFunctionalTestCase.java function (buildSessionFactory()).

Try this!

package your.package;

import org.hibernate.HibernateException;
import org.hibernate.SessionFactory;
import org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration;
import org.hibernate.service.ServiceRegistry;
import org.hibernate.service.ServiceRegistryBuilder;

public class HibernateUtil
{
    private static SessionFactory sessionFactory;
    private static ServiceRegistry serviceRegistry;

    static
    {
        try
        {
//          Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
            Configuration configuration = new Configuration().configure();

            serviceRegistry = new ServiceRegistryBuilder().applySettings(configuration.getProperties()).buildServiceRegistry();
            sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory(serviceRegistry);
        }
        catch (HibernateException he)
        {
            System.err.println("Error creating Session: " + he);
            throw new ExceptionInInitializerError(he);
        }
    }

    public static SessionFactory getSessionFactory()
    {
        return sessionFactory;
    } 
}

Configuration hibConfiguration = new Configuration()
            .addResource("wp4core/hibernate/config/table.hbm.xml")
            .configure();       

serviceRegistry = new ServiceRegistryBuilder()
            .applySettings(hibConfiguration.getProperties())
            .buildServiceRegistry();

sessionFactory = hibConfiguration.buildSessionFactory(serviceRegistry);
session = sessionFactory.withOptions().openSession();

The following expresses the experience I had with hibernate 4.0.0.Final.

The javadoc (distributed under LGPL license) of org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration class states that:

NOTE : This will be replaced by use of ServiceRegistryBuilder and org.hibernate.metamodel.MetadataSources instead after the 4.0 release at which point this class will become deprecated and scheduled for removal in 5.0. See HHH-6183, HHH-2578 and HHH-6586 for details

After looking at issue 2578, i used something like this:

ServiceRegistry serviceRegistry = new ServiceRegistryBuilder().configure().buildServiceRegistry();
MetadataSources metadataSources = new MetadataSources(serviceRegistry);
metadataSources.addResource("some_mapping.hbm.xml")
SessionFactory sessionFactory = metadataSources.buildMetadata().buildSessionFactory();

For it to start reading configuration, i had to modify my hibernate 3.2.6 configuration and mapping files to use xmlns="http://www.hibernate.org/xsd/hibernate-configuration" and xmlns="http://www.hibernate.org/xsd/hibernate-mapping" and also remove the dtd specifications.

I couldn't find a way for it to inspect mappings defined in hibernate.cfg.xml and hibernate. prefix for hibernate-related properties in hibernate.cfg.xml is no longer optional.

This might work for some.

I, for one, ran into some error because mapping files contained <cache usage="read-write" /> and ended up using deprecated Configuration way:

Configuration configuration = new Configuration().configure();
SessionFactoryImpl sessionFactory = (SessionFactoryImpl) configuration.buildSessionFactory();
EventListenerRegistry listenerRegistry = sessionFactory.getServiceRegistry().getService(EventListenerRegistry.class);
SolrIndexEventListener indexListener = new SolrIndexEventListener(); // a SaveOrUpdateEventListener i wanted to attach
listenerRegistry.appendListeners(EventType.SAVE_UPDATE, indexListener);

I had to programatically append event listeners because Configuration no longer looks for them in hibernate.cfg.xml

Even there is an update in 4.3.0 API. ServiceRegistryBuilder is also deprecated in 4.3.0 and replaced with the StandardServiceRegistryBuilder. Now the actual code for creating the session factory would look this example on creating session factory.