In a nutshell, I want to send hibernate objects in a detached state to my client, which in this case is a browser running javascript generated by GWT. If you're not familiar with Google Web Toolkit, essentially it is core java functionality compiled down into javascript. Yes, it sounds weird, but it works and it is pretty cool. It is written in java, debugged in java, and ultimately deployed as javascript. So, theoretically, you can use hibernate in conjunction with it, given it uses standard "core" functionality. GWT is about to add support for Serializable, which was a big hurdle in combining the two technologies. The other hurdle I see at this time is hibernates Set and Map implementations. GWT supports most (if not all) of java.util, but unfortunatly this doesn't include hibernates set and map types.

Now, as I said I am fairly new to hibernate. But from what I've gathered, hibernate's custom map and set objects are made necessary primarily to support lazy loading and such. Is this the case, and if so, is there a way to use a standard map or set if one were to use eager fetching?

I appreciate your help.

Brian

Hello Brian,

The hibernate4gwt library (http://hibernate4gwt.sourceforge.net) has been developed to solve such issues (lazy loading, type conversion, etc...).
It allows you to use your Hibernate domain classes in the GWT client side with minimal effort.

Hope this helps !
Bruno