I'm using JPA/Hibernate (a newbie at them). When an exception occur (could be an unique constraint violation) I want to catch it and show some application meaning messages, instead of printing the stack trace.
Does Hibernate provide some tool to get info (maybe database independent) about exceptions?
HibernateException encapsulates the actual root cause than can provide you enough information for you to generate meaningful user-friendly messages. Read the Exception Handling section of their documentation.