SoftwareEngineering

DAOs aren't dead, but they cannot be considered as a general best practice any more. They should be created in a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, fashion. If you discover data-access code duplication in your service layer, just factor it out to a dedicated DAO and reuse it. Otherwise it is just fine to delegate to an EntityManager from a service. The enforcement of an empty DAO layer is even more harmful, because it requires you to write dumb code for even simple use cases. The more code is produced, the more time you must spend to write tests and to maintain it.

With JDK 1.5 and the advent of generics, it is possible to build and deploy a generic, convenient, and typesafe DAO once and reuse it from variety of services

key ingredients of a service-oriented component: Facade: Provides simplified, centralized access to the component and decouples the client from the concrete services. It is the network and transaction boundary. Service: The actual implementation of business logic. Domain structure: This is a structure rather than an object. It implements the component's persistence and exposes all of its state to the services, without encapsulation.

This convention not only standardizes the structure and improves maintainability, but also allows automatic dependency validation with frameworks like JDepend, Checkstyle,  Dependometer, SonarJ, or XRadar. You can even perform the validation at build time. If you do, the continuous build would break on violation of defined dependencies. The rules are clearly defined with strict layering: a facade may access a service, and the service a domain object, but not vice versa