Alright, I’m way too busy these days to read through all of this, so this is more of a toread. I found an article on schema evolution over at Martin Fowlers bliki. Check it out here, it looks good on first glance. It relates to a lot of the stuff we’re doing these days with a lot of integrationpartners.
Some interesting points and links to information here.
POJO validation is a bit of a hassle, especially if you are trying to protect your objects state by beeing restrictive on the get/set methods. Often you have to open up the object because of needs from webframeworks etc. At the JavaBin forums I came across OVal which tries to solve validation problems through annotations and aspects. Looks interesting and I’ll have to take a look at it whenever I get lucky enough to develop on a Java 5 project. 😉