EntityComposite

Entities are common in the object oriented programming world, but has never reached the stardom of Class and Object. Instead we have seen many attempts at creating Entities on top of Java, such as EJB (3 incompatible versions), Java Data Objects (JDO, 2 somewhat compatible versions), Java Persistence Architecture (JPA, still in ver1.0), Hibernate (3+ somewhat incompatible versions) and many other less known. This seems to suggest that the topic of creating objects that survives over long periods of time is a difficult one.

Eric Evans points out in his book that Entities is a very definite and distinct concept that needs to be handled explicitly. Composite Oriented Programming in general, and Qi4j in particular, takes this point very seriously and makes Entities a central part of the whole system. And likewise, we are convinced that it is not possible to develop domain-knowledge-rich applications without a conscious and well-defined strategy on Entities. So, instead of spending endless hours trying to get Hibernate mapping to do the right thing, we introduce a Composite meta type called EntityComposite, which all entities must derive from, and by doing so automatically become persistable, searchable, have a lifecycle and support nested undoable modifications.

The characteristics of an EntityComposite compared to other Composite meta types are;

It has an Identity.
It has a LifeCycle.
It is typically persisted.
It can be referenced by an Association or ManyAssociation.
Its CRUD operations are bound by a UnitOfWork.

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