DTO, DAO, and DCO. What is a DCO?

All I can say is Data Carrying Object is not what DCO means, put "Data Carrying Object" in google and it doesn't return any hits.

Thus the terms has to be wrong.

Ok tried googling "Data Objects DCO"

and got this result, which would suggest DCO means "Data Change Objects"

My guess is a DCO is an object that holds changes, a "diff", of the Object's Data.


I just spoke to the guy who used to remember what this stands for. It's pretty ironic that he no longer does. Nor do any other people here in this company.

The explanation I could find was, that it's basically a DTO, but they wanted to use DCO to differentiate between DTOs used by Hibernate and DCOs used by external systems, in this case LDAP.

So I believe the meaning of DCO could really be, as Bhushan suggests, Data Carrying object or the like, and in this case it was indeed intended to be just another name for DTO. Answer accepted. Thanks for your time! I thought DCO was an accepted acronym widely used by developers but it turned out to be just this... sorry.

Edit


THE answer is Data Container Object, for those interested. I have caused enough stir in the company so eventually a colleague emailed the local originator of the DCO term and, if anyone still cares to find out, it stands for Data Container Object.


DTO = Data Transfer Object

DAO = Data Access Object

DCO = Dynamically Configurable Object?

From the article

Dynamically configurable object (DCO)

an object whose implementation can change incrementally after it is running

  • consists of interface elements
  • public function
  • private function
  • private data along with all accessor functions
  • member functions support incremental changes to interface elements
  • adding, removing, or altering