How To Create Session Factory in Hibernate 4

There are many APIs deprecated in the hibernate core framework. One of the frustrating point at this time is, hibernate official documentation is not providing the clear instructions on how to use the new API and it stats that the documentation is in complete. Also each incremental version gets changes on some of the important API. One such thing is the new API for creating the session factory in Hibernate 4.3.0 on wards. In our earlier versions we have created the session factory as below:

SessionFactory sessionFactory = new Configuration().configure().buildSessionFactory();

The method buildSessionFactory is deprecated from the hibernate 4 release and it is replaced with the new API. If you are using the hibernate 4.3.0 and above, your code has to be:

Configuration configuration = new Configuration().configure();
StandardServiceRegistryBuilder builder = new StandardServiceRegistryBuilder().
applySettings(configuration.getProperties());
SessionFactory factory = configuration.buildSessionFactory(builder.build());

Class ServiceRegistryBuilder is  replaced by StandardServiceRegistryBuilder from 4.3.0. It looks like there will be lot of changes in the 5.0 release. Still there is not much clarity on the deprecated APIs and the suitable alternatives to use. Every incremental release comes up with more deprecated API, they are in way of fine tuning the core framework for the release 5.0.