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EOF Developer's Guide
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About This Book
This book describes concepts that you'll need to know when writing a Enterprise Objects Framework application. To help you find what you are looking for, this book is organized into three parts:
- Part 1, "Enterprise Objects Framework Essentials", provides an overview of how Enterprise Objects Framework works and the different types of applications you can build with it. The first chapter, "What Is Enterprise Objects
Framework?", describes what Enterprise Objects Framework is, how it's different from other products, and what features it offers. The second chapter, "Enterprise Objects Framework Viewed Through Its Classes", provides a description of the classes used in Enterprise Objects Framework applications and how they fit into different types of applications.
- Part 2, "Enterprise Object Design", describes how to implement business logic for your application. With Enterprise Objects Framework, you put business logic in business objects, called enterprise objects. The two chapters in Part 2, "Designing Enterprise Objects" and "Advanced Enterprise Object Modeling", describe the tasks you perform in defining the enterprise objects for your application.
- Part 3, "Application Design", describes how to implement application-level logic for your application. Enterprise Objects Framework provides a basic structure for all applications that use it. The chapters in this section- "Application Configurations", "Connecting to a Database", "Behind the Scenes", and "Answers to Common Design Questions"-describe that structure, how it's established at runtime, and how to intervene in its default behaviors.
There are no prerequisites for learning Enterprise Objects Framework; however, it does help if you understand something about relational databases and Entity-Relationship modeling. If you aren't familiar with these topics, read the Appendix, "Entity-Relationship Modeling". While Enterprise Objects Framework largely encapsulates the programmer from having to know about relational databases, you still need to understand Entity-Relationship Modeling to map your enterprise objects into a relational database for storage.
Entity-Relationship Modeling terminology is used by the Enterprise Objects Framework classes and documentation to describe this mapping.
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