Enterprise Objects Framework - What Is An Enterprise Object (EO)?

What Is An Enterprise Object (EO)?

An Enterprise Object is analogous to what is often known in object-oriented programming as a business object — a class which models a physical or conceptual object in the business domain (e.g. a customer, an order, an item, etc.). What makes an EO different from other objects is that its instance data maps to a data store. Typically, an enterprise object contains key-value pairs that represent a row in a relational database. The key is basically the column name, and the value is what was in that row in the database. So it can be said that an EO's properties persist beyond the life of any particular running application.

More precisely, an Enterprise Object is an instance of a class that implements the com.webobjects.eocontrol.EOEnterpriseObject interface.

An Enterprise Object has a corresponding model (called an EOModel) that defines the mapping between the class's object model and the database schema. However, an enterprise object doesn't explicitly know about its model. This level of abstraction means that database vendors can be switched without it affecting the developer's code. This gives Enterprise Objects a high degree of reusability.