Hi all,
Sorry for the mass emails all at once about the dbconfig stuff 
So just a quick status update following the last thread about the dbconfig module. In the last thread Simone brought up the issue about lazy loading being an issue. I am happy to say that I believe i have squashed it and now have a dbconfig that utilizes lazy loading for all associations.
To do this I had to more or less drop some of the automatic hibernate session management that you get with spring, and do it manually at the servlet filter level. Actually after doing quite a bit of googling about the LazyInitializationException issue in hibernate, this issue seems to be quite common and the solution well known. To use the OpenSessionInView servlet filter that opens and closes a single session per request. Transaction management is still handled by a spring proxy.
And I am happy to say that the UI feels just as snappy and fast as with the in memory config. Although I cant; say for sure as i have done no formal benchmarking.
The wicket ui seems to be happy for the most part… except for the layer edit page which uses a tab panel each backed by a model for the resource and its associated layer. Long story short the issue is that the objects are directly serialized (to maintain changes between tab switches) rather than looked up from the catalog directly. So once you switch a tab the lazy collections of the object created by hibernate no longer function because they don’t have a session. Nasty issue.
I tried to solve this by having the model reattach the layer and resource to the current hibernate session whenever they are accessed but that leads to another set of issues.
So this is still an open issue. I would love some suggestions from the more hibernate savvy folks here. The only thing i can think of at this point is to rewrite that page to use a different type of wicket model. Basically copying all the resource and layer properties into a map and use that as the backing model for the form, and then reapplt the properties when the form is saved. Not nice but the only thing I can think of at this point.
-Justin
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Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.