Id like to define my objects then use hibernate to generate my ddl from this. But it seems like the only real workflow with hibernate is to generate a datbase schema and then reverse engineer it. Am I wanting to do something that makes no sense?
Yes there is a property hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto. The documentation says:
Automatically validates or exports schema DDL to the database when the SessionFactory is created. With create-drop, the database schema will be dropped when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly.
e.g. validate | update | create | create-drop
There are multiple ways to define this property, depending on how you configure your SessionFactory. The hibernate way is to simply add:
<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">update</property>