I know I have to do my homework in depth, but I would appreciate two quickies please.

a) What happens when a remote session EJB business method returns an HBM POJO, that features a lazy-loaded collection (Set foos) and getFoos is called?

b) Do you think it's OK for the web layer to pass (unsaved) HBM POJOs to the session EJB layer?

Apologies if the questions raise RTFM-like answers; I'de still appreciate pointers to URLs...

Thanks,

Manos

a) -> Exception
b) -> Yes

Thanks Michael.

Regarding lazy collections; can I implement some kind of intermediate logic that will allow the collection to remain lazy from the client side of things?

I wouldn't want to initialize them just to send the complete graph needed to the client, I'd like this to be transparent and dont mind a liitle more work to make it so. Sorry if this is somewhere in the docs but I couldn't find anything specific to remote EJBs and Hibernate...

If the collection is lazy="true" it will be not loaded until someone iterate over it. If the client side iterate it will arise an exception. So you could build a code in the session bean that iterates over the collection that will need to be loaded before send it to the client.
The best part is that when the graph come back to persistence, hibernate is capable of know if the collection has changed or should be ignored.
I'm going by a similiar way, with good results.