Jarrod,
Firstly as per JPA Specification you cannot have OneToMany unidirectional without a join table so either you need to have a join table or live with ManyToOne on the other side.
Regarding serialization, I agree that bidirectional relationship forms a circular reference so Jaxb doesn't serialize the circular graphs,
One way to resolve this is using @XmlTransient variable in you child class on the variable which refers parent.
There are some other ways which even i am looking at, but haven't tried due to the limitation of server version availability at my end.
http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=47299 https://jaxb.dev.java.net/guide/Mapping_cyclic_references_to_XML.html Let me know if any of these works if we want to live with bidirectional relationship.
Thanks,
Rahul
[ August 01, 2008: Message edited by: Rahul Juneja ]