Kudos to my friend Eric who told me about Hibernate. For those of us who have spent their professional careers building database schemas and writing Java classes to do nothing but store and read objects from a database, this is a huge time saver... not to mention a good foray into the magical world Object Databases. Technically of course, the technology is not for true ODBs, but for RDBs which is something most techies are more intimately familiar with.
It is quite possible that a technology like this will play an important role with Web services as well. I say that having written many myself, and all of them follow a very simple design pattern: complex types map to objects, all objects have primary keys, and the interface provides the classic CRUD (CReate, Update, Delete) set of methods.
Which leads me to a random thought: It is quite possible that Web services could evolve to pattern themselves after EJB design patterns (something to some extent I shudder to think about)... but the idea of "Entities" and "Sessions" may have a relevance to Web services as well. You have data stores, and interfaces for storing and retrieving them, and you have services which take action on objects.
