I cannot believe it is now 5 years ago I bumped into hibernate, and if you use the way back machine and know the original url(s) of the project you can have a walk down memory lane (yes, the front page were even simpler than what Christian just posted in the very first days of Hibernate; I guess he were being nice towards Gavin and his taste of color)

Browsing through the online mail and forum archives is also tremendous fun; could be interesting to collect some of the milestones and funny anecdotes from these.

Coincidentally I get to celebrate this event by doing the first public training in Copenhagen about Hibernate on 5-6. December, see here for details. I'll look forward to be in the motherland to tell and teach about the current result of the 5 years journey.

I will also be presenting on Hibernate JPA and EJB3 in Copenhagen 4. December at Dansk-IT Java group meeting. You can see the program (in Danish) here .

See you in Copenhagen and to Hibernate and the team: Tillykke med fdselsdagen!

Happy Birthday Hibernate! Now that the first copies of Java Persistence with Hibernate are shipping (still waiting for mine though), the first people who should get one are Hibernate contributors. Manning Publications sponsors 25 copies of the book, and we'll distribute them in exchange for 25 Hibernate forum credits. See this page for details.

Also, I'm not sure I promised Gavin to never show this, but this is how the Hibernate website looked like five years ago: Old Hibernate Website[1]

Say what you want about the look of the page, some of that content is still here today unchanged. Good stuff.