Hi,

we are developing a stand-alone thick client application with Hibernate that talks directly to the database. It's Model View Controller, and the model objects are of course persistent through Hibernate. All objects are displayed for a long time on the user's screen, and the user may navigate around in them as needed. So you get all those issues with lazy loading and detached objects.

This whole issue with the extent of sessions and transaction is really different in such a design as it is with web apps. I've been searching high and low for discussions specific to this scenario, but no such luck.

Any links to best practices for thick client designs?

thanks,
-Gunther

http://www.hibernate.org/42.html

http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/java/Seam__first_impress.html

Actually webapps and rich clients have quite a lot in common. We are using the session-per-conversation pattern (keep a single Session with the objects being edited in the rich client; keep the Session disconnected during user think time; when pushing changes to the database, connect the Session, open a transaction, save the changes, commit, and disconnect again).

Here's another thread on how to handle versioning issues in this situation: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?p=2266139#2266139

Cheers!
Rob