> I forgot to say that I think about using eclipse.

Jaybird is being developed with Eclipse. For my J2EE projects though I use
MyEclipseIDE plugin (commercial). However, the WTP plugins should be stable
enough to be used instead of it and they are free.

> And I used hibernate before. But only in a rather simple way and in a
> web (struts) environment.

So do I. Frankly I do not see advantage of using Hibernate for a Swing-based
application. I do not know about any of the Swing controls that would be
simpler to use with plain Java objects instead of JDBC result sets.
Hibernate won't update your objects if their state changes in the database,
you will have to re-execute query anyway.

Also considering that Hibernate was designed with primary usage scenario on
the server, including sophisticated transactional cache, etc. it seems to be
an overkill for Swing application. But again, I never used Hibernate with
Swing.

>>> For reporting facilities I consider jasper/iReports.
>>
>> I have not used them.
>
> Did you use any other reporting components?

Not for GUI applications. On the server side I have had very good experience
with OpenOffice and JOOReports. We generated OOo documents in XML without
OpenOffice at all, then with help of OOo we were converting them to RTF and
and provided access via WebDAV. People could edit the documents as much as
they liked and then press the button - documents were converted into PDF and
archived.

>>> Besides any comments which I always appreciate I really would love to
>>> see some sample application (source code) to see how things work
>>> together: firebird + hibernate + swing + reporting.
>>
>> The Firebird/Jaybird do not introduce any noticable specifics into the
>> Swing/Hibernate usage scenarios. You can use any example of using
>> Swing/Hibernate you find in the internet.
>
> But I haven't found any good/usable/helpful ones yet :-(

Neither did I, so very likely that is not very proven technology...

Roman