Build an EOModel
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 10
Column Tag: Navigation Services
How to Build an EOModel (or look just like one)
by Patrick Taylor and Sam Krishna
Back in 1996, there wasn't much competition for WebObjects. Nowadays however
there are dozens of web application servers on the market, each promising that their
package will make it oh-so-easy to publish data from your relational database to the
World Wide Web.
If you picked some other web application server you generally had a choice of two
solutions: tying yourself to a single vendor's database package (the "simple" solution)
or embedding SQL into your page template (the not-so "simple" solution). If writing
SQL is your idea of a fun Friday night or if you don't believe that object-oriented
classes are a spectacular improvement over SQL., then you probably won't fully
appreciate EOF's special charms. But even if you aren't 100% sold on the Enterprise
Objects Framework, the sexy EOModeler application might still turn your head.
EOModeler, one of Apple's WebObjects development tools, provides you with a simple
way to manage a great deal of the complexity associated with databases. EOModeler lets
you graphically design your object/data model.
In EOModel, you replace some of your relational database terminology with
object-oriented ones. However, the concepts map quite neatly.
EOEntity
An EOEntity represents an actual class in an object model, one which generally stands
for a table in a database. Fundamentally, though, an EOEntity represents some piece of
information or data that must be captured and represented in your application.
EOAttribute