I've been thinking about the problem of users who ask for "lazy fetching from the client". As we keep explaining, this is an incredibly bad idea, since transaction demarcation and caching (and probably also dirty checking) should take place in the same tier as lazy fetching.
However, many of these users are writing Swing or rich client applications and I think perhaps the reason they ask for this is that they are forced to run Hibernate in the server tier since they are not allowed to open a JDBC connection from the client, and Hibernate is tied to the JDBC connection pool.
After thinking about this, I think I've decided that there is nothing at all wrong with doing data access via a remote "gateway", so that Hibernate would run in the client tier and act as a remote client of a server-side JDBC connection pool. This would enable transaction demarcation, caching, dirty checking and lazy fetching to be done on the client, but the actual database access would take place on the server.
Now, as far as I can see, there is no reason at all for this to be implemented as part of the ORM solution. Indeed, it makes much more sense for this to be simply wrapper abound JDBC. The wrapper would do transparent batching of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETEs and provide pluggable client/server remotability strategies (RMI/SOAP/etc), delegating to a server-side connection pool. It could even be used outside of Hibernate.
Does anyone know of an existing project like this? If not, should we start one, under the aegis of hibernate.org? Is anyone interested in starting work on this. I'm convinced it is not at all difficult to implement.
Have I gone insane?
-- Gavin King +61 41 053 4454 +1 404 822 8349
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