Hibernate: Simple Classes Aren't So Simple

I was fighting with Hibernate the other day, trying to figure out why it was giving me a query error. After much too long, I decided to implement unit tests for my measly two classes, which I thought were too simple to really need unit tests.

Almost immediately, I found bugs in one of the two persistent classes I was working with that were confusing Hibernate and leading it to generate the error message that was confusing me.

I checked the Hibernate best practices page and my lesson isn't listed. It may sound obvious, but here it is:

While your classes may be simple, Hibernate is not. Always implement a unit test to verify that the simple parts of your persistent objects are mapped correctly by Hibernate before moving on to more complex issues like inheritance, relationships, containment, etc.