using Hibernate 3

Have POJO generated with XMLBeans which models unbounded child elements as an object array which presents a problem when mapping Collections in Hibernate. Whole idea behind persistent collections is to react to remove/add/set as delete/insert/update calls. Pushing a collection into an array defeats that idea.

XmlBeans doesn't allow generation with lists/collections only Array[]. JAXB might be an alternative since it seems to handle unbounded elements with List.

Persistent (actually populating the collection properties in the fetched element) is important to my design (have lazy equal to true) due the potential number of relationships pulled into property collections. Wondering if I could extend the AbstractPersistentCollection and return the array object as an Array[]? Maybe by:

getSnapshot - at the end instead of returning an ArrayList use the toArray() method
equalsSnapshot - always dirty since i don't want users to update collections anyways
.....

Ideas?