Does Hibernate implement attribute-level lazy fetching?
Hibernate uses proxies generated at system initialization time to implement lazy fetching of associations. This is a basic feature of any ORM solution; Hibernates implementation has the advantage of not requiring any build-time processing – an essential feature for agile development. Hibernate also supports lazy fetching of any attribute via instance variable interception. This feature requires use of a build-time bytecode enhancer (an Ant task). We don’t believe that this feature is very useful in most applications and we have often shown that every use case can be implemented in a more elegant and robust way.
