I am creating my first ‘real’ program in Java, and I am trying to create a database that stores different courses at my school. The issue that I’m having is that I want to be able to check if somebody has completed all of their pre-requisites before going into any chosen class. But in order to do this, would I not need to store an instance of the pre-requisite in the pre-requisite field of the chosen course and run some sort of isComplete() method? That is—-is there some sort of way to create an object oriented database? I have heard of serialization, but I’m unsure if it’s the most efficient way to do what I’m hoping to achieve. Thank you in advance
While it is theoretically possible to use serialization, you probably shouldn’t, since no human would be able to examine the database directly and discern its contents. I think there have existed (and may still exist) databases which directly support Java objects, though I don’t know if it addresses the problem I described. Usually, applications convert each attribute of a data object to a column in a table in an SQL-based database. It’s not all that much work.