Greetings everybody.

I am working on a project architecture, which uses Hibernate, Axis and Spring. I use Hibernate tools to generate POJOs from an existing database schema. I also implemented a DAO layer, which runs queries and returns collections of those POJOs. I am trying to expose my DAO layer as a webservice, but am not sure what would be the best way to do this.

My current intension is to use Castor (or any other XML-to-Java framework) to marshal and unmarshal POJOs to and from XML. I would then register Castor serializers and deserializers with Axis to send Hibernate POJOs over the wire.

It seems pretty straightforward, but I would like to avoid using Castor classes generated for the Hibernate POJOs.

So, my question is what is the best way to get Hibernate-generated POJOs sent over SOAP using Axis? I am not adamant about using Castor, so I alternative solutions would be more then welcome.

My requirements are that I don't want to have Java-specific beanMappings in my webservice descriptor and I don't want to have multiple classes (e.g. one POJO class, and one Castor-generated class for this POJO class) corresponding to each Hibernate POJO class.

I would appreciate anybody sharing their solutions to this problem.

Thanks.

Alec

Have you tried the XML mapping features of HB3?

As far as I understand Hibernate3 allows generating XML documents from POJOs based on the metadata information in the mapping files. Those XML documents must conform to the XSD schema types, which I register with my web service definition.
What would be the best way to ensure this?

Even if I get POJOs to be marshalled correctly to XML on the server side, I am not sure if HB3 allows converting XML back to the POJO on the client side so that my server and client use the same POJO classes.
Can HB3 take an XML document and populate corresponding POJO object with that data?

Thanks.

Alec

As a follow up, it would be really nice to have Hibernate generate an XSD schema based on the information from the Hibernate mapping files.