Introduction

The most of the basic objects that Synapse currently supports are Entities. Each Entity has first class data that makes up the fields of an entity. All Entities also have Annotations that store additional data about an entity.

Currently, all Entities are defined by "hard-coded" Java objects. The fields of these Java objects define the first class data of each entity. The only mechanism we have for constraining data of an Entity is to write Java code to do the validation. We also lack a mechanism to constrain or define annotations.

While defining entities using Java allowed us to quickly get a first version of Synapse built, we always planed on supporting a more dynamic approach to object definitions. Ideally we would like our users to define entities without writing Java code. Over the past year we have considered several technologies for entity definitions, but ultimately decided to use: JSON Schema 03. We will not cover that details of this selection process in this document.