ADF Business Components
The ADF Business Components architecture has five types of components, listed as follows:
Entity objects
Entity associations
View objects
View links
Application modules
You can think of Entity Objects as representations of your database tables — there will be one entity object for every table your application uses.
Tip
You can also base Entity Objects on database views, as long as these database views are updatable. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/view-updatability.html for information on when MySQL views are updatable. In some databases (for example, Oracle), you can define special INSTEAD OF triggers to make views updatable.
Entity objects take care of the object-relational mapping and perform many optimizations for you; for example, entity objects cache data in the middle ties to save database round trips.
Similarly, you can think of Associations as representations of the relations between tables in your relational database –– there will normally be one association...
