I need some help/recommendations/suggestions. I need an architecture which will support a 3 tier system consisting of a swing client which remotely acceses my business objects from a middle tier that performs lightweight business logic. I would like to use something like the dto pattern with my business objects to increase performance between the swing client and server layer.

I am a newbie to hibernate but would like to couple it with something else to create this remote server layer. I would appreciate if anyone had any specific suggestions. What can I couple hibernate with to create this remote layer? Is spring something that would fit into this mix?

This is standard; pick a remoting API, eg, RMI, Corba , SLSBs and build it appropriately. There are number of comms approaches; Command, Transaction script etc, again select one that is appropriate or your comfortable with. Spring will help alot with DAO and Transaction management at the backend. I suggest you put together a small sample app with each layer just to see how it glues together and get a feel for the architecture you have selected.

So you are suggesting using rmiregistry straight up. I see it seems to have some integration with spring. Does hibernate have any rmi integration?

You don't have to use RMI. Use any method that you are comfortable with. If your swing client is going to be used outside your organization then I might recommend a web service, since then firewalls don't get in the way as much and you can (in theory) reuse the web service for other applications which might not be in java.

When you're asking about Hibernate having integration with RMI (or one of the other methods), I would say that Hibernate allows your classes to just be regular java classes which can be made serializable, so it allows you to use something like RMI without having to use DTOs.

I find that one of the larger problems in this type of architecture, which has nothing to do with Hibernate, is deciding how coarse to make the interface to which the client connects. There isn't a magic formula and you kind of just have to make a decision and see what happens.