I have a 3 layer app. The second layer is receiving and object from the 3rd layer and there are two attributes from this object that I need to pass on to the 1st layer (UI). Should I make this object's class visible in the 1st layer (by importing it's package/namespace, which I'm trying to avoid) or should I pass on these attributes as an string array (I'd rather have an Object array, but they're a string and an int types in Java 1.4) and cast them to their proper types in compilation time (Their types are fixed, so thankfully this is an option)?