I see that Hibernate3 has per-property lazy fetching. Though the roadmap says

Is this true even for many-to-one (i.e. entity) properties? Or only for value type properties?

It is designed for things like "large" strings, but it is possible to use it as replacement for proxies (probably it is not a bad idea too).

But does it require build-time instrumentation?

(What I want to do is, for example, when querying the "article" table I do not want proxied objects, but when fetching articles via an "order line" object, I want them lazily fetched)

It will work as expected, it is not required at this time.
Probably this stuff confuses, but it is just a new optional feature for "large" value fields.

Only for value type properties. Many to one lazy mecanisme still work the way it has always been.

i'm not sure, here is what we see in H3b3 changelog
* added lazy="true" to many-to-one and one-to-one mappings (requires bytecode instrumentation)

This is on top on the class lazy loading.
If your class is lazy, the you don not need to set lazy="true" on many to one (Actually I'm wondering whether we should ignore it or not).
If your class is not, then build code enhancement is mandatory.
I'd definetly recommend the first one

Probably it was changed (I just gues it from source code). Eclipse builder must must be usefull for this stuff, I can implement it in cglib or contribute it for hibernate tools project if somebody is going to use it.

BTW, it is possible to add chained "FieldProvider" transformation to this task. It adds interface to class for direct field access.

baliukas you are very welcome to provide any enhancements to our instrument task - and adding "hibernate builder" support to eclipse is on the roadmap (to support seamless generation of pojo's etc.) - you are very welcome to contribute on that!

/max

Ok. this is very interesting for me, I develop eclipse pluggins and MDA /code generation stuff myself.

Does this mean you wont like to contribute this stuff to the existing plugins ? ,(

Yes, I want to contribute and I think I can help (I develop GEF based graphical editors at this time and I have more fun than with databases)
Do you have some special list for tools projects ?

no special list. hibernate-devel and-or the tools forum.

GEF skills is also interesting for us to visualize the Configuration in Hibernate 3. Let me know if you want to work on that too ,)

Ok, I will resubscribe to hibernate-devel, it is better place to discuss. I am subscribed, but have too many mail accounts to find the right one :)