Important related concepts

The following terms refer to specific concepts when we talk about properties and their tree structures.

View

A fixed, read-only view of a changable PropertySet. Once created, a view does not change, regardless of how the underlying PropertySet changes.

Name

Refers to one of two things: (a) How up to date a view is, represented as a BigInteger. The greater this BigInteger, the more up to date it is. (b) The oids of a PropertySet.

Delta

A change difference between one view of a PropertySet and a later one. Thus a delta has a ``from'' name and a ``to'' name.

Store

Like a view, but deltas can be applied to update it. A store is transactional, so if two updates clash, one is guaranteed to fail rather than corrupting the store.

Tree

Like a PropertySet, but can be traversed more easily and can have listeners attached to detect changes.