When I'm learning something new one of the things that slows me down is poor documentation. I think the app engine java documentation Storing Data could be improved if it used consistent terminology in the area of entity groups, which is a crucial part of understanding how the data store works.
Sometimes the documentation uses the terms owned and unowned relationships, sometimes the terms parent and child. I'm thinking that the owned and unowned terms aren't the best choice since you can't use them to say anything about a child. To my way of thinking an owned relationship is a parented relationship. But then you can't say that an unowned relationship is an unparented relationship since the owned entity could have a parent. Perhaps you could call it a nonparented relationship? Or maybe a nonparenting relationship? Overall I much prefer the terms parent and child; the data is stored with a tree structure and parent and child are the natural terms when talking about trees. I also think that if the terms parent and child were used instead of owned (and unowned) that it could help people more quickly understand that the structure in the data store is a tree. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine for Java" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine-j...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine-java+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java?hl=en.
