Our team uses the special strategy to work with associations. Collections are lazy, single relations are lazy too, except references with simply structure (for an example a countries reference). And we use fluent-hibernate to load what we need in a concrete situation. It is simply because of fluent-hibernate supports nested projections. You can refer this unit test to see how complex object net can be partially loaded. A code snippet from the unit test
List<Root> roots = H.<Root> request(Root.class).proj(Root.ROOT_NAME)
.innerJoin("stationarFrom.stationar", "stationar")
.proj("stationar.name", "stationarFrom.stationar.name")
.eq(Root.ROOT_NAME, rootName).transform(Root.class).list();
See also