Wondering what the recommended approach would be in a web application that constantly refers to data in a single table - like a user table.

Should I:

1) Put the individual pieces of data into the container's (Tomcat) session and refer to them there.
2) Store the Hibernate ID - that references the proper Hibernate persistant class - in the Tomcat session. Then everytime I need to refer to user info, do a lookup on the ID ....
3) Store the Hibernate java bean itself in Tomcat's session, and not even deal with the look-up.
4) Something else I'm not aware of.

Thanks in advance for the advice!

For something like "logged in user", I would load the Object once and store it in the session. Do not use the session as a caching mechanism however, thats not really what it is for. Use the session for what it is intendet, associating objects with the "current user". For caching, use a cache.

Thanks!

I guess my choice of words wasn't the best - I didn't really mean cache. Like you described, all I want is quick reference to data associated with the currently logged in user.

So store the Hibernate java bean directly in the container's session. Sounds good to me.

Hmm, although that would mean I should make the java bean serializable. Doing that should be OK as far as HIbernate is concerned, right?

Hibernate doesn't mind if your beans are serializable or not