Prior to Hibernate 3.0.1, Spring provided 2 classes namely: HibernateDaoSupport to get the Session from Hibernate and HibernateTemplate for Spring transaction management purposes.
However, from Hibernate 3.0.1 onwards, by using HibernateTemplate class we can use SessionFactory getCurrentSession() method to get the current session and then use it to get the transaction management benefits.
HibernateTemplate has the benefit of exception translation but that can be achieved easily by using @Repository annotation with service classes.