Hibernate Tools can be used "standalone" via Ant 1.6.x or fully integrated into an Eclipse + WTP based IDE, such as JBDS/JBoss Tools, or a default Eclipse + WTP installation. The following sections describe the install steps in these environments.
Note:
The Hibernate Tools 3.2.4.GA (the current release version) requires Eclipse Ganymede 3.4.2.
JBoss Tools 3.0.0.GA (the latest release) includes Hibernate Tools 3.2.4.GA and thus nothing is required besides downloading and installing JBoss Tools. If you need to update to a newer version of the Hibernate Tools just follow the instructions in the Eclipse IDE section.
To install the Hibernate Tools into any Eclipse 3.4.x based IDE you can either download the Hibernate Tools distribution from the JBoss Tools download page or from the JBoss Tools Update Site.
If you download the Hibernate Tools distribution you need to place the /plugins and /feature directory into your eclipse directory or eclipse extensions directory. Sometimes Eclipse does not automatically detect new plugins and thus the tools will not be activated. To ensure eclipse sees these changes just clean up the cached plugin information by running eclipse with the -clean option, e.g. eclipse -clean. Using the updatesite does not require any additional steps.
Note:
If you need more basic instructions on installing plugins and general usage of eclipse then check out https://eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net/ and especially https://eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net/visual-tutorials/updatemanager.html which covers using the update manager.
The Hibernate Tools plugins currently use WTP 3.x which at this time is the latest stable release from the Eclipse Webtools project.
Because the WTP project not always have had proper versioning of their plugins there might exist WTP plugins in your existing eclipse directory from other Eclipse based projects that are from an earlier WTP release but has either the same version number or higher. It is thus recommended that if you have issues with WTP provided features to try and install the plugins on a clean install of eclipse to ensure there are no version collisions.
To use the tools via Ant you need the hibernate-tools.jar and associated libraries. The libraries are included in the distribution from the Hibernate website and the Eclipse updatesite. The libraries are located in the eclipse plugins directory at /plugins/org.hibernate.eclipse.x.x.x/lib/tools/ . These libraries are 100% independent from the eclipse platform. How to use these via ant tasks are described in the Ant Tools chapter.