I am wondering what is the best way to handle mapping of entity beans (JPA 2) to DTOs.
Since you cannot use entity beans "directly" with GWT, you need to handle DTOs instead.
I have several entities with various relationships (OneToOne, OneToMany, ManyToMany with a join table etc).
Initially i started converting all entities to DTOs by hand with the help of a class MyEntityTransform.java with methods like :
Other methods are : persistent2BeanCollection(...), persistent2BeanMap(...), bean2Persistent(...), bean2PersistentCollection(...)
That becomes a fastidious task when handling collections, especially when the same entity has references to several other entities;
However i am not sure how well it handles the various JPA mappings (manytomany for instance) and how much work it is to configure it in the dozer-bean-mappings.xml file.
Also i guess this framework is intensively using reflection to perform mapping operations. Such approach is much slower than mapping performed "by hands", e.g. when i use the methods in my MyEntityTransform.java class.
What do you suggest ? i'm interested in everybody's experience handling JPA entities with GWT.