How do GUI applications typically manage the session lifecycle? I'm used to using Hibernate in Web applications where the session lifecycle is pretty clear.

The GUI application I'm working on opens a session for the first database transaction from a thread and then just holds it open until the application is closed. This model fails when multiple instances of the application access the same database due to concurrency problems and due to stale versions of versioned persisted objects.

The application uses lazy instantiation heavily, so I can't just open sessions for each database transaction and then close them immediately. What's the next best option? Is there a standard practice for this sort of application?

(I couldn't find much guidance in Hibernate in Action.)

Work out what objects need to be displayed, load and hyrdate the colletions, detatch the objects and send to the view layer.

I ended up using data transfer objects which were created by the data/model layer to transfer the data. The handy thing is that I can easilly change the UI.