Hello. I'm figuring out how to integrate Hibernate with JSF 2.0 and I'm curious what the best practice is, particularly for the beans.

I'm using annotations to configure both hibernate and JSF. Currently I'm constructing it so that the JSF managed beans are being persisted with hibernate, with @Transient annotations on any getters that I don't want saved.

Is this the "right" way to do it?

Another couple of questions:

When doing things like sorting lists, should I get the database to do the sorting, or should I just load it into a List and sort it using java code?

When objects contain references to other objects, should the property be a reference to an object that is automatically loaded from the database, or simply a long (or whatever) representing the database key, and I manually load the referenced object from the database?

Have written a blog post about putting jsf 2.0 spring 3.0.0 and hibernate 3.2.2GA together ... here is the link

http://blog.pariyani.com/?p=7

No, don't bother playing around with keys. Use object references -after all, that's what Object-Relational mapping is all about. Just make the association lazy, so you don't always load the associated object. If you do need the associated object, make sure it's loaded while a Hibernate Session and a transaction is still active.