Clearly, annotations simplify the maintenance of persistent domain entities. However, I have a situation where the same set of entities will be used in multiple applications - the main Java application that runs on a server, a swing client that needs to display and manipulate the entities, and finally some external applications that do what-if analysis on the same entities. Only the main Java application needs to persist them. If I use JPA annotations then I am forcing all applications to link with JPA and Hibernate for no good reason. What is the recommendation in this situation - use annotations or switch to xml configuration (the latter option allows linking to JPA/Hibernate only when needed)?

Thanks.
Naresh

Hi,

personally I don't see a problem there. If you are sticking with JPA annotations all you need to include for your clients is the javax.persistence jar. You don't have to include the actual Hibernate runtime dependencies. I think that is a fair price for a more compact and easier to maintain meta data configuration.

Maybe this thread is also of interest for you: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?p=2391258.

However, the whole discussion is certainly a little bit of a religious one, similar to database design and many other design questions. I am sure there many developers out there who would consider using annotations in this case as 'not clean'.

I don't think there is a definite right or wrong answer to your questions. Sorry :)

--Hardy