A meta domain model

In the field of object-orientation it has for some years been common to talk about modelling the domain; to create domain models. This makes perfect sense if you're a car dealer or a pet shop, ie. a business with a specific domain. But what about those development projects that does not apply to a specific domain, but to all kinds of domains?

This was the situation when I decided to start the DataCleaner project some months ago. What I needed here was a domain model concentrated with data sources, their structures and the data they contained. I searched the Open Source offering on this and to my surprise didn't find any solid attempts to do this. Sure there are object-relational-frameworks like Hibernate which enables you to create your own domain model objects and "easily" map them to a database, but it's not possible to map the database itself to objects that represent the structure of the database.

Initially I just started making such a model myself - I mean, how hard could it be? The result was the DataCleaner metadata & data layer, which works fine in DataCleaner, but wasn't quite developed for reuse in other applications. So now I've started creating a new project, which I'm calling eobjects.dk MetaModel. The MetaModel project takes of where the DataCleaner metadata & data layer stops. We have classes like Schema, Table, Column etc. but we will try to remove (encapsulate) any tie to JDBC, because if you want to see a messy API (or more correctly: messy implementations), then look at JDBC. We will also use the MetaModel to take advantage of "new" language constructions in java like enumerations, generics etc.

Here are some of the plans for MetaModel:

• Schema model: Schema (and unification of the very ambigious Catalog and Schema terminilogy in JDBC), Table, Column, ColumnType (enum), TableType (enum) etc.
  
• Query model: Query, SelectClause, FromClause, WhereClause, GroupByClause, HavingClause, OrderByClause etc.
  
• Data model: Dataset (with Streaming and keep-in-memory options), Row

My hope for this is to make an API which makes it possible to interact with your database in a type-safe manner and avoid query problems, hardcoded literals in the code etc.