Eric Westfall added a comment - 08/Jun/11 11:38 AM I think it's fine to continue to use these on the BO's because I don't think ojb does a great job of handling the non-sql types (without the use of "converters"). One thing we do have to consider here is our api-layer model objects. We should look into using DateTime in JODA time instead and create an appropriate XmlAdapter to convert it for JAXB. There are some other places where we are using java.util.Calendar but that presents problems with the .equals method. See Jason's explanation below: - we decided to use Calendar but in order to implement equals properly we had to use Calendar's compareTo method instead of Calendar.equals(someOtherCalendar) - Calendar would marshal to an xml timestamp how we wanted, but internal fields in Calendar were missing when we unmarshaled, thus causing .equals to return false even when the times were the same - I think what we decided to do was use EqualsBuilder.reflectionEquals as normal but also exclude Calendar entries and && that with the result of EqualsAndHashCodeUtils.equalsUsingComipareToOnFields - which some little reflection hackjob I whipped up and travis used in N.O. at some point An example of this can be found in CriteriaDateTimeValue and is specifically implemented by our EqualsAndHashCodeUtils utility class.