XEO Library - Introduction

In this chapter we'll introduce a sample application, The XEO Library, which we'll use throughout the documentation to go more in depth in the various XEO Concepts vaguely described up until now.

The XEO Library is an application to help manage a library with its target users being the librarians who work there, whom must register the books users take home to read and also register when they return the books. Librarians are also responsible for creating user accounts (the equivalent of giving them a Library Identity Card) and managing all the information about the books (including their titles, authors, publishers, etc...). Librarians also have a private messaging system so that they can send notifications to each other. Figure LibIntr.1 depicts a subset set of actions Users and Librarians can do in our library (the figure is a UML-like Use Case diagram), the diagram is not complete will all the actions that are possible, but includes the most important actions and actors.

XEO Methodology for the Library

To create the XEO Library application using this description as our basis, the first step would be to try an identify the entities that could become XEO Object Models, their attributes and their relations. The next step would be to create a XEO Project in XEO Studio and proceed with the creation of the XEO Object Models and Viewers that represent our entities.

The creation of the XEO Project in XEO Studio will be done in the next chapters, in this chapter we'll just identify the entities and their relations, as well as their attributes.

The most important entities in the XEO Library are Books. A Book typically has a set of simple (textual, numeric, etc...) attributes, such as a title,

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