hello,

so far my research in (n)hibernate documentation has revealed that the visitor pattern (and therefore any other virtual method call) works because hibernate's proxies box the call to a lazy loaded encapsulated concrete instance. but what's about peformance:

does hibernate load each concrete entity singly or does it force a prefetch for all entities that are part of the currently iterated collection? Assuming a first load scenario where no cached data is available ... or is exactly this fact the only key for success, because caching on session factory level will ensure overall performance for this kind of request?

answering this question would help me a lot because I plan to develop an abstract web content snipplet that could be extended to display different types (i.e. simple html or picture galleries, and so on ...). but it should also be relatively fast.

regards,
joe