Re: JSF + Spring + Hibernate

[Ken Weiner]

I have a question about designing a webapp to use a DAO layer, lazily loaded objects, Hibernate, and the OpenSessionInView technique.

Doesn't this strategy make it very difficult to reimplement the DAO layer sometime in the future?  If you switched a DAO implementation from Hibernate to let's say, Spring JDBC, then how would all the lazy loading work?  There would be no equivalent OpenSessionInView technique for Spring JDBC.  For this reason, I have been shying away from designing my domain objects such that the rest of the app expects them to lazily load data.

So, instead of a Company class having a getEmployees() method, I would choose, instead, to have a CompanyDao.getEmployees(Company company) method that must be called at the point my webapp needs all the Employees for a Company.

Have any of you had the same concerns?  Or am I missing how a webapp that relies on lazy-loaded object graphs can change DAO implementations easily?

-Ken