Inheritance

TODO

Interface

TODO

Components

A component is an entity that cannot live by its own, but has a logical meaning. Take for example an Address. It may live alone, but doesn't make much sense in some systems. Once associated with an User it starts making sense. Now, as in RDBMS you can choose the persist this as a record in a separate table with a 1-1 relation, or you may choose to persist Address field along with the User.

Now, returning to JCR, the component is fitting perfectly the mixin notion. A mixin cannot live by its own in the repository. It is associated with some node. It's properties are added to the set of original node.

Group some bean attributes into a subnode

TODO

Map to another node structure

Sometime, it should be interesting to map to a different jcr node structure. Here is an example, for a class “File”, we can have:

public class File
{
  private String mimeType;
  private String encoding;
  private InputStream data;
  private Calendar lastModified;
  // Add getters/setters
}

and in terms of JCR structure, we can have:

nt:file
  jcr:content
    jcr:mimeType
    jcr:encoding
    jcr:data
    jcr:lastModified

So, the jcr:content node is an extra node to specify in the mapping file.