Web services and JPA - not a good mix?

Question

Hi!
Sorry if this question isn't web services specific, but this forum is the closest I've found here at SDN.
I'm having a bad time trying to figure out how to use JPA and web services in the same application.
Problems is, some of my entities contains binary data, and instances of those entities are members of other entities. If I'm correct, that is an enormous waste of memory on the server side, and worse, I need to transmit some of those entities via web services so the resulting SOAP message will be really huge. See the example below:
@Entity
public class A {
  @Id
  private Integer id;
  private byte[] data;
@Entity
public class B {
  @Id
  private Integer id;
  @ManyToOne
  private A a1;
  @ManyToOne
  private A a2;
public static void main(String[] args) {
  A a = new A("huge_data.avi");
  B b = new B();
  b.a1 = a;
  b.a2 = a;
  WebService.send( b ); //TWO identical "huge_data.avi" sent down the wire
}From what I've read from other forums, setting the fetch type to "LAZY" in the binary data is problematic since the entities will be dettached and serialized into SOAP messages.
Is JPA the right choice in this case? I could drop JPA and begin to use JDBC (and use "id"s instead of full object references) but some of the benefits of JPA would be wasted. See how it would become:
@Entity
public class A {
  @Id
  private Integer id;
  private byte[] data;
@Entity
public class B {
  @Id
  private Integer id;
  private Integer a1Id;
  private Integer a2Id;
public static void main(String[] args) {
  A a = new A("huge_data.avi");
  B b = new B();
  b.a1Id = a.id;
  b.a2Id = a.id;
  WebService.send( a, b ); //Fine now, but all "A" objects would need to be sent as a separated list.
}Sadly, almost every example out there on the web about JPA+web services is very simplified to be of any real usage.
Please, help me. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

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