title: Easy way to save basic auditing data on domain objects?
body: <p>My application uses large trees of domain objects and for most of these objects I'd like to persist some basic information (updatedby, modified time, etc.). I have already added these properties &amp; columns to my application.  </p>
  
  <p>I was about to code the setting of these values in all the various constructors, etc. when it occurred to me that the persistence layer should handle this transparently.  </p>
  
  <p>But how?</p>
  
  <p>I could certainly do this from within my DAO's, but how to handle the objects that are persisted via a cascade save?  Is there a way to intercept the persist() method on those?  </p>
  
  <p>What's a good way to implement this capability?</p>