I'm working on an application accessible via both the web (Struts), and Soap (Axis). I'm using Castor to marshall/unmarshall my domain objects and I'm noticing that when I change an object and send it back to the server, when I call update(), Hibernate deletes and recreates my many-to-many relationships, even though I haven't changed the contents of the collection. When I inspect the object in my debugger after unmarshalling, everything looks normal. I don't know how Hibernate even knows the object has been sent over the wire. Hibernate only uses collection proxies for unitialized collections, right? Anyone had this problem? Any tips would be appreciated.

The collection wrapper contains a snapshot of the old collection state. This is a FAQ.

I have been having issues with SOAP serialization, where in many-to-one relation of the child object back to the parent is causing infinite looping of the serialization. Can one of you explaing.. how this problem was solved when working with Axis?

-Bhaskar