Session Facade in the world of Spring/Hibernate - is it still relevant?

How would we implement a Session Facade design pattern in the Spring application? Would the role of the Session facade be simply served by the service bean class that would be annotated for the transactions a开发者_JAVA技巧nd will have a session scope?

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A Spring service (with singleton scope) is like a local stateless session bean, it is an implementation of the Session Facade pattern, only for applications that are not distributed. Spring does make the case that in most cases services don't need to be distributed and that the distributed aspects of Session facade are not as all-pervasive as J2EE made them out to be.

(When you say "session scope" it sounds like you're confusing session as in transactional with session as in HttpSession, because Spring uses the term session scope to refer to HttpSessions. (At least it's confusing me about what's intended.) My reading of the Session facade description leads me to think it doesn't have anything to do with an HttpSession.)

Anyway, I'd say the basic goal of encapsulating complexity is still valid. In some cases the goal of giving distributed access is still very valid, it's just not the default case like J2EE tried to make it out to be. And Seam makes a case for stateful session beans still being relevant.

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Session should be associated with the web tier, not services.

Services do indeed own transactions, so they should have that annotation.