Hi,

We're working on the design of a three tier application that uses a thick Swing client. The middle tier uses hibernate to access the data from mysql and then send the objects to the Swing client based on queries to the client.

As we've traveled through the discovery phase of this approach, we've wondered about a few issues with this approach:

1.) Can the Swing client create a local hibernate cache that can be queried without querying the middle tier using a level 1 or 2 cache?

2.) Will hibernate work on a local cache (1 or 2) without having access to a database? (corollary to above)

3.) What is the best way to access a lazy loaded data hierarchy from the Swing client? (WebObjects has an approach based on mirroring the object graph on the server and client. The object "faults" in the child object, the first time the child is accessed. I've also seen mention of using the old entity bean approach.)

Any other lessons learned from the field on the best use of hibernate for this type of architecture would also be much appreciated! :-)

Thanks,

Rob