I've taken the Order, Product, Customer, LineItem example from the hibernate documentation and translated it to a real project with a struts front end. I'm having difficulties using interfaces rather than implementation classes and I want to know what the best way around this would be.

I have 1 form and 1 action that will just add a Prodcut using hibernate.

The form class, ProductForm, extends ActionForm but implements the Product interface.

The hibernate mapping uses the Prodcut interface and a subclass of ProductImpl.

Now, when ever I try to save the ProdcutForm, casting it to a Prodcut, hibernate will barf and tell me that it doesn't have a mapping for ProductForm.

Does this defeat the whole purpose of using interfaces or am I just using hibernate wrong?

Do I need to have some type of translator that takes the ProductForm and populates a ProductImpl?

Posting you mapping would be useful.


Anyway, here's and example:

Let Solicitante be an interface
Let ProductoImpl be a class wich implements Solicitante



IMHO, you should separate the user interface componentes (struts ActionForms) from your bussines objects.