I'm building a rich client application backed by hessian web services and a hibernate data access layer. Various forms show the user a list of beans with a JTable, allowing the user to edit, delete, add new items, somtimes change the order of the items. After all of the changes have been performed, the user presses a "save" button to save them on the server.

Now, I don't want to send back to the server every bean, but only the
changed ones, since some lists can contain hundreds of beans.
The list showed to the user is the result of a Session.find(...) call, so it does not add any persistence service (right?). Adding a wrapper that can store separately a list of added and removed beans is trivial, what is more complex is to determine what row did change.
Of course I could do this by using a special table model, but I'd prefer something more transparent, like the hibernate automatic dirty checking, only that I want to perform this on the client side.

Do you have suggestions on how to implement this? I thought I could serialize every bean before the editing starts, so that I can compare the beans with their original state afterwards, but since you're the experts in dirty checking, what do you suggest?

Is there any library out there that already does what I'm looking for? I've searched a bit with no success...

Best regards
Andrea Aime

Well, it doesn't exactly match your architecture, but if you have to chance to think about an other one have a look at http://www.corix.ch. Unfortunately it's not free.

HTH
Ernst