Basic Object Model

The following illustration provides a simplified view of the object model provided by the Escenic Java Application Programming Interface (API):

What the model tells you is this:

• An Escenic installation can be used to manage one or more web sites called publications. A magazine publisher, for example, might use a single Escenic installation to maintain one publication for each of it's print magazines:

• Each publication may contain one root section. This root section may contain any number of subsections, each of which may contain further subsections. This allows you to create a tree or hierarchy of sections, which may be as large and deep as you want it to be. It determines the structure of a publication and usually provides the basis for the primary menus used to navigate the web site. Here, for example, is a very simple section hieararchy:

• A section may contain any number of content items (represented by Article objects). Content items are the basic text, graphical and multimedia components from which a publication is constructed: news articles, opinion pieces, images, video clips, sound files, attachments such as PDF files and so on:

• A content item may appear in many sections, although it only belongs to one of them, called its home section. A news story about soccer transfer fees may belong in the sports section of a newspaper, but also appear in the business section, for example:

• A section may own any number of section pages (represented by Pool objects). A section page is a "front page" or index for a section - it is what the reader of a publication sees when they click on a section link. It contains a number of links to content items in the section. Although a section may have several section pages, only one of them can be active (that is published in the publication):

  Section pages have an internal structure involving further objects, which we will look at more closely in Presentation Object Model.

• A content item can have relations to other content items. A content item containing a news article, for example, might have relations to images that appear in the articles, other articles on the same subject (that appear in the published article as links), and background video clips.

The package name of the Escenic API classes is neo.xredsys.api, so the fully qualified class names are neo.xredsys.api.Publication, neo.xredsys.api.Section, neo.xredsys.api.Article, etc.