[hibernate-dev] Bytecode enhancement and field-access

In working through the document overhaul I ran across the following passage in the JPA specification: <quote> The persistent state of an entity is represented by instance variables, which may correspond to JavaBeans properties. An instance variable must be directly accessed only from within the methods of the entity by the entity instance itself. Instance variables must not be accessed by clients of the entity. The state of the entity is available to clients only through the entity’s methods—i.e., accessor methods (getter/setter methods) or other business methods. </quote> (from section "2.1 The Entity Class" in the JPA 2.1 specification). Notice that the spec explicitly calls out that even with field access the expectation is that the application still access the state via methods. In other words our concept of "extended enhancement" is actually beyond the spec.