A simple, standard and reusable way of creating toString, equals and hashcode methods in your classes/beans can be found in the jakarta commons.lang package:

import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.EqualsBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.HashCodeBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringStyle;
public class BaseBean {
    public String toString() {
        return ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(this, ToStringStyle.MULTI_LINE_STYLE);
    }
    public boolean equals(Object o) {
        return EqualsBuilder.reflectionEquals(this, o);
    }

    public int hashCode() {
//             EDIT: this hashCode-implementation seems to break Hibernate:
//             it throws a LazyInitializationException
//    return HashCodeBuilder.reflectionHashCode(this);
//
//             using this implementation for now
        return new HashCodeBuilder(25, 71) // random odd numbers
                .append(this.getId())  // a field in BaseBean, not shown for brevity
                .append(super.hashCode()) // using the standard hashcode too
                .toHashCode();
    }
}