Hi our server application uses annotated entities. The communications between applications clients and the server go through a midleware layer, the reconstruction in the client re-creates the entities as they were in the server. This gives us an unfortunate side-effect: a dependency on the EJB3 and Hibernate Core for the clients when using maven to build the clients. The annotations are handy for the client developers when doing things like range and size checks on data as the schema constraints are nicely documented there.

However the client developers don't appreciate having the rest of hibernate dangling from their apps to no purpose. I suppose it is possibe to extract the class files for the annotations and re-package them, I can't imagine why the annotations would have any real dependency on the actual EJB3/hibernate engine.

Has anyone any experience of this?
Thanks