Hibernate evolved from the frustration of EJB's complexities and performance issues. Hibernate provided a way to abstract SQL and allowed developers to focus on persisting objects. Hibernate, as an ORM framework, helps to map objects to tables in relational databases. Hibernate had its own standards when introduced, and code became tightly coupled with its standard implementation. So, to make persistence generic and vendors agnostic, Java Community Process (JCP) developed a standardized API specification, known as the Java Persistence API (JPA). All ORM frameworks started following this standard, and so does Hibernate.

Spring doesn't implement its own ORM; however, it supports any ORM framework, such as Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, and so on. With the ORM solution, we can easily persist and access data in the form of Plain Old Java Object (POJO) objects from relational databases. The Spring ORM module is an extension of the Spring JDBC DAO module. Spring also provides ORM templates, such as the JDBC-based templates we saw in Chapter 5, Understanding Spring Database Interactions.