How does Hibernate "hook" persistent Java objects?

When I call a property "get" method on my Java object, Hibernate code somehow gets called. How does this happen? This violates my traditional Java mindset.

reflection

pull a "Customer" from the database. do a toString() and you'll see that the class type is not really your Customer. It's an instance of a class that is generated at runtime. google "Proxy Design Patern" to learn more about these classes .

to anyone, I'm sure plenty of you have looked under the "work" directory in Tomcat . You can see the servlet a JSP is translated to by Catalina. Is there any way to see the proxy a POJO is translated to by CGLIB?

Ahh.... Now that makes sense. Very interesting. Yes, it would be interesting if I could see this generated class. Thanks!