Does anyone know how to solve this problem?
I manually change some data in the DB and hit refresh on the browser but the data does not change in the frontend...
The app server logs are showing the correct select statement again produced by Hibernate and the sql works correctly in the db when I run it. It feels like the data in the frontend is being cached, even though I called session.flush and criteria.setCacheable(false) and sessionFactory.evict(). My hibernate.cfg.xml file is not using 2nd level cache:
<property name="cache.provider_class">org.hibernate.cache.NoCacheProvider</property>
I even called session.getTransaction and transaction.commit before session.close and it still doesn't work...

What do you mean by manually? Did you do it with an external tool or with a specific method of yours?

About this:

Calling beginTransaction(), then committing at the end is not an option. It's compulsory to correctly demarcate every tx.

About refreshing from the client side, are you sure you don't cache objects by yourself somewhere? In the http session or somewhere else for example?