In these days of Gigabit networks would it be silly to have a remote client ask the server to load lazy collections for it.

Perhaps the proxy code have some code to recognise its been serialised onto a client and have call-back to a SFSB (or similar) that has the Hibernate session - which does the SQL and returns the details - without the client needing to know.

I would like a complete object graph and default everything to lazy. But I might want my client to browse the object graph.

Just an idea.

old bad idea since it breaks transaction isolation.

-max

There are many architectures that might need this but I think some can be made work:

If the remote client is still serving a UI then the scope of the session is still a UI event - even though it corresponds to a long-running transaction on the server (by definition long-running but in reality not really) - therefore transaction isolation is not an issue in this situation.

A distrubuted object framework needs to start somewhere so why not with the problems that have a solution. Then smart people can make it do more and more.

Probably it is not trivial, but it is possible to implement "remote" lazy loading using statefull session bean as hibernate session and client side transaction demarcation (UserTransaction). It doe's not break transaction isolation (statefull session beans are designed for this stuff).

See http://h3t.sourceforge.net

This framework does as you describe.
It was created because of a need to navigate large, recursive object graphs in a fat client.
Please feel free to make suggestions and hurl abuse (preferably constructive abuse).

But wouldn't the SFSB then monopolize the underlying DB connection?

There is no problems with stefull beans, but you must remove bean as soon as possible (bean per request must be optimal in web application).
It works http://www.hibernate.org/377.html without problems in my prototype. I can send code for your project, probaly you will find something usefull, there is lazy collection support too (client code depends on cglib).

Thanks, but I have in mind a fat client that wants to go back for associated data minutes or hours after the initial service call.
That's the kind of application for which I wrote H3T.