hibernate automatically saves/edits objects that are updated

Kind of mysterious – all you want to do would be to update the some component on your java logic and it is automatically saved in the database.
Here is the typical scenario, if you are updating collection of objects and and updating one object would also update others based on some logic – say reordering of numbers, the session would all be saved without saving all the collections – yup I got this exact situation and the reason was

After the update, I have another ajax call to the backend where I would get the list of objects. And the method which collect the objects was annotated as Transactional. In this case, all the dirty objects in the session would be saved though what I wanted was to read only.

So, I changed the annotation to Transactional(readOnly=true) – that took care of it.