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This last guideline is the one I feel least certain about. It requires more initial code and more maintenance than directly referring to the domain objects, and it forces the backing bean to more closely track changes to the page and business logic. The benefits are: 1) The bean explicitly controls what's on the page. 2) The domain classes don't have to be serializable. (If we serialized the Assignment Grade Record as it's currently defined, it would pull in its referred-to GradableObject, which in turn would pull in its referred-to Gradebook....) The first benefit was the one I was most interested in, since our goal was predictability. The second may be bogus, since we're being much more cautious about direct links and collections than we were in the Pilot. We still wouldn't want to serialize all data that feeds into the Roster page, but on some other pages it might be useful.