intermediateSpring Internals — Bean Lifecycle & Proxies
Why does exposing JPA entities directly from REST APIs eventually become a production problem?
Entities carry lazy associations (risking LazyInitializationException during JSON serialization), can leak internal/sensitive fields, tightly couple your API contract to your database schema, and make it hard to evolve either independently — DTOs decouple the two and let you control exactly what's exposed.
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