Container-managed datasources: Hibernate can use JDBC connections managed by the container and provided through JNDI. Usually, a JTA compatible TransactionManager and a ResourceManager take care of transaction management (CMT), esp. distributed transaction handling across several datasources. You may of course also demarcate transaction boundaries programatically (BMT) or you might want to use the optional Hibernate Transaction API for this to keep your code portable.

Automatic JNDI binding: Hibernate can bind its SessionFactory to JNDI after startup.

JTA Session binding: The Hibernate Session may be automatically bound to the scope of JTA transactions. Simply lookup the SessionFactory from JNDI and get the current Session. Let Hibernate take care of flushing and closing the Session when your JTA transaction completes. Transaction demarcation is either declarative (CMT) or programmatic (BMT/UserTransaction).

JMX deployment: If you have a JMX capable application server (e.g. JBoss AS), you can chose to deploy Hibernate as a managed MBean. This saves you the one line startup code to build your SessionFactory from a Configuration. The container will startup your HibernateService, and ideally also take care of service dependencies (Datasource has to be available before Hibernate starts, etc).