title: What does it mean to hydrate an object?
body: <p>When someone talks about hydrating an object, what does that mean?</p>
  
  <p>I see a Java project called Hydrate on the web that transforms data between different representations (RDMS to OOPS to XML). Is this the general meaning of object hydration; to transform data between representations? Could it mean reconstructing an object hierarchy from a stored representation?</p>