Finding Fault
Volume Number: 17
Issue Number: 1
Column Tag: WebObjects
By Sam Krishna and Patrick Taylor
Why the EOFaulting mechanism neatly solves a
thorny problem in the Object-Relational paradigm
The Object-Relational paradigm is the conceptual foundation to the Enterprise Objects
Framework (EOF). Concepts such as tables map nicely to classes, rows to objects,
row-column values to instance variables (ivars), etc. The mapping is so neat and
clean that one is rather surprised to find a terrible flaw marring the paradigm.
One difficulty is that few situations are easily encompassed by single, isolated tables. A
relational approach is frequently needed. However, having started down the
Object-Relational path, what happens to objects that are related to other objects?
What happens if a large set of objects is related to a single object? How can these