I have question related to the "Hibernate in a Layered Architecture" document (http://www.hibernate.org/124.html).

Background: I am developing an application where the front-end is a Swing app and physically separated from the server. I would like to transfer information to this Swing client using DTO's because pushing enties would be very inefficient (large object graphs) and error prone (in case some proxies have not been loaded).

Question: What is the most efficient way to convert DTOs to (presentation-specific) object graphs? I could hand write assemblers/converters, but that is very time consuming. In addition, updates to these object graphs (from the server) would require effort - DTOs will have to be merged into existing objects. Are there any libraries that would help with this? I notice that Hibernate's StatefulPersistanceContext does similar things, i.e. converts flat result sets into object graphs. Something similar to this but using VOs as input would be perfect! Any ideas?

Thanks.
Naresh