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We will begin refactoring the CSF DAO code immediately, while staying on Hibernate 3.2.5. We will remove all references to the Spring Hibernate 3 helper classes (HibernateDAOSupport, HibernateTemplate etc.) and use unit tests to verify that the current functionality remains intact. This refactoring should not affect any apps using CSF - the interfaces and functionality will remain the same; we are just refactoring underlying implementations.
IMPORTANT: as a standard, we should make sure all DAOs extend the MIT class AbstractHibernateDAO. This class provides an abstraction barrier between our code and the underlying ORM API.
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