All,
Has anyone ever used Hibernate in a client-server environment. What I would like to do is have a Swing application client use Hibernate, but I don't want the client to directly connect to the database. The easiest way I can think of doing this is to use some sort of client/server based JDBC driver, which actually delegates to a remote machine somehow (RMI, SOAP, etc.). Has anyone ever done something similar to this before? How did you do it? How was the performance?

We've done it with an app written in VB using SOAP. Be aware that you have extra overheads with the remote calls which will make it a bit slower than direct Hibernate calls but not unusable. Having not really done any RMI I'm not sure I can make any recommendations but we've done alright with a combination of Apache Axis for SOAP and Castor for serialising our data to XML.

It would be nice if there was a reusable proxied JDBC driver which connected to a remote object (pluggable protocols like RMI, EJB, JAX-RPC would be nice) to perform its work. Has anyone seen anything like that? I found RmiJdbc, but that only supports RMI.

I found it! It's called Virtual JDBC (http://vjdbc.sourceforge.net/). I'm going to try to get Hibernate to use it right now...

if you think an elegant way to deal with client-server using Virtual JDBC, send me a mail anthony@hibernate.org