7. Glossary

Application Tiers

See Application Tiers and Blocks.

Application Properties

Application properties are named data values of various types that define different aspects of application configuration or functions. See Application Properties.

Application Blocks

See Application Tiers and Blocks.

Artifact

In the context of this manual, an artifact is a file (usually a JAR or ZIP file) that contains executable code or other code obtained as a result of building a project. An artifact has a name and a version number defined according to specific rules and can be stored in the artifact repository.

Artifact Repository

A server that stores  artifacts  in a specific structure. The artifacts that the project depends on are loaded from the repository when that project is built.

Base Projects

The same as application components. This term was used in the previous versions of the platform and documentation.

Container

Containers control lifecycle and configuration of application objects. This is a base component of the dependency injection mechanism also known as Inversion of Control.

CUBA platform uses the Spring Framework container.

DB

A relational database.

Dependency Injection

Also known as Inversion of Control (IoC) principle. A mechanism for retrieving links to the objects being used, which assumes that an object should only declare which objects it depends on, while the container creates all the necessary objects and injects them in the dependent object.

Eager Fetching

Loading data from subclasses and related objects together with the requested entity.

Entity

Main element of the data model, see Data Model.

Entity Browser

A screen containing a table with a list of entities and buttons to create, edit and delete entities.

EntityManager

A middle tier component for working with persistent  entities.

Interceptor

An element of aspect-oriented programming that enables changing or extending object method invocations.

JMX

Java Management Extensions − a technology that provides tools to manage applications, system objects and devices. Defines the standard for JMX-components.

See also Using JMX Tools.

JPA

Java Persistence API – a standard specification of the object-relational mapping technology (ORM). CUBA platform uses  EclipseLink framework that implements this specification.

JPQL

Database-independent object-oriented query language, defined as a part of the JPA specification. See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Persistence/JPQL.

Lazy loading

See Lazy Loading.

Local attribute

An entity attribute that is not a reference or a collection of references to other entities. Values of all local entity attributes are typically stored in one table (with the exception of certain entity inheritance strategies).

Localized message pack

See Message Packs.

Managed Beans

 Components that contain application business logic.

Main Message Pack

See Main Message Pack.

MBeans

Managed Beans that have a JMX-interface. Typically, such beans have an internal state (e.g. cache, configuration data or statistics) that needs to be accessible through JMX.

Middleware

Middle tier –  the application tier  that contains the business logic, works with the database and provides a common interface for higher client tier of an application.

Optimistic locking

Optimistic locking – an approach to managing access to shared data by different users that assumes a very low probability of simultaneous access to the same entity instance. With this approach, locking itself is not applied, instead the system checks if a newer version of the data is available in the database at the moment when the changes are being saved. If so, an exception is thrown and the user must reload the entity instance.

ORM

Object-Relational Mapping – a technology that links tables in a relational database to objects of a programming language.

See ORM Layer.

Persistent context

A set of entity instances loaded from the database or just created. Persistent context serves as data cache within the current transaction. When transaction is committed, all persistent context entity changes are saved to a database.

Screen Controller

A Java class containing screen initialization and event handling logic. Works in conjunction with screen’s XML-descriptor.

Services

Middleware services provide the business interface for client calls and form the Middleware boundary. Services can encapsulate the business logic or delegate the execution to Managed Beans.

See Services.

Soft deletion

See Soft Deletion.

UI

User Interface.

View

See Views

XML-descriptor

An XML file containing layout of visual and data components of a screen.