Wanted to get my thoughts on the current state of the metamodel down so we could all discuss.
First to define some vocab for discussing. I say that the old code (Configuration, HBMBinder/AnnotationBinder, mapping package) used a "push" model. The binders interpreted the various user supplied values and made decisions *pushing* the results of those decisions to the mapping classes. The new code attempts a "pull" approach. The user values are interpreted into BindingState and RelationalState objects which get passed in to the Binding objects which *pull* the data from the states. At the most basic of descriptions, what is it we are trying to accomplish here? Well we have some mapping information supplied by the user in a number of forms (hbm, annotations, etc) and need to correctly build/populate a binding model based on the values and interpretations of those values. In designing I always go back to the question of "how would I accomplish this task by hand". Here, the first thing I see is that we have user values in multiple formats. So the very first thing I would do, ideally, is to some how normalize values from those different "sources". I would then take those normalized values and then populate the binding model. So here is what I suggest: 1) What we currently call "state" objects would serve the role of this normalization. We would have specific things to normalize hbm, annotations, etc. It could even be just different implementations of the same normalized interface which are constructed with whatever they need to answer the contract queries. 2) These normalized value objects are then passed into THE binder which uses the information there to build and populate the bindings. 2 things to note here. First I said THE binder. The idea is that there is just one for both annotations and hbm as the differences were removed during normalization. Second this part is a push approach. Specifically that means the bindings and models are mutable. In my mind this sits between push and pull (or does each) -- Steve Ebersole <st...@hibernate.org> http://hibernate.org _______________________________________________ hibernate-dev mailing list hibernate-dev@lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev
