Great work gentlemen. I've finally downloaded my copy and am very pleased with the quality thus far - first rate.

In regards, to the interlude on DTOs in section 8.1.2 I thought it might be interesting to get some additional insight into your thoughts on DTOs in a distributed enterprise environment.

As I scower the forums I see that many architectures are victims of shotgun change and parallel class hierarchies, and they've adopted DTOs, DTO factories/assemblers. We take advantage of the fact that DTOs flatten/minimize the graph of objects, provide for view separation, decrease the volume of data that is being sent over the wire, etc. but struggle with the maintenance overhead and assembler generalization issues (that is, completly decoupling assemblers from underlying DAO/persistence API).

I currently advocate usage of domain objects in applications where the VM is being shared (ie. web applications). However, for enterprise applications with rich clients, I'm not convinced (although I would like to be) that serializing domain objects and foregoing DTOs is a good thing.

I was hoping the authors could continue this discussion here as the book left me wanting a little more...

Regards,
Roll

DTO, DTO... always DTO, people wondering and spending too much time thinking about those stupid objects lol.... the solution isn't very easy

take a look at
http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... sc&start=0

this has been posted on feb 2004, 6 months later i would like to inject my pojo graph directly in my jsps, but i cannot, other members of my professionnal team (not hibernate team lol) don't want it and as we are a team, i respect it!

So, like you, i need to manage and fill those idiot presentation objects, let's see if someone has a magical way to do it.