[Gnue-dev] Halloween 1: Terminology

[Reinhard Mueller]

Dear friends of GNU Enterprise and other spooky things,

This is the first mail in a series of mails that sum up the results of
the GNUe Hackers meeting in Frankfurt that took place at Oct 31, 2002.

Attendants of the meeting were Reinhard Müller, Jan Ischebeck, Johannes
Vetter, and Ariel Caló.

The first point we talked about was terminology, to make sure that we
all mean the same thing when we say something.

When we talk about databases, we talk about
* Tables and Rows
* Fields
* Primary Keys and Foreign Keys
* Triggers and Stored Procedures

When we talk about on object oriented programming language (such as
Python) and we refer to the constructs of this language, we talk about
* Classes and Instances
* Attributes
* Methods

When we talk about business objects, we want to use the words
* Class (which means a "sort" or a "type" of objects)
* Object (like a "thing")
* Property
* Procedure (which is "what an object can do")
* Bound Procedures (which is a procedure that is bound to a specific
event).

The terms for databases and language constructs were choosen because
they are usual terms in those fields.

The terms for business objects were chosen with the goal in mind that
they should be perfectly understandable by business people.

For example: We think that a business person doesn't have an idea about
what an "instance" or an "attribute" might be, but he will very likely
understand the terms "object", and "property".

Please be aware that we had no native English speaker among us, so we
are still open for improvement. However, we believe that it's important
to define it very early in the stage. If there are no objections, I will
probably update the existing documentation during next week.

More will follow...

Thanks,
-- 
Reinhard Mueller
GNU Enterprise project
http://www.gnue.org

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