title: How do you select a column using Hibernate?
body: <p>I would like to select a single column instead of a whole object, using Hibernate. So far I have this:</p>
  
  <pre><code> List&lt;String&gt; firstname = null;
  
   firstname = getSession().createCriteria(People.class).list();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My problem is that the above code returns the whole People table as an object instead of just "firstname". I'm not sure how to specify to only return "firstname" instead of the whole object.</p>