I know that a lot of people, especially the hibernate developers, say that you can use hibernate entity or domain objects as data transfer (dto) or value object (vo) when transfering data between layers of your application. In my experience this seldom works as you are bound to get lazy load exceptions (LazyInitializationException) at some point. Exchanges about how to handle dtos/vos can get quiet heated on the hibernate forums and personally I canŽt understand why they are so adament about their šuser hibernate entity beansš approach.