I’m a bit of a software terminology buff. One of the favorite terms that I’ve heard over the years is Plain Old Java Objects, or POJO. It rhymes with pogo, as in pogo stick.

After thinking about a case where a Backbone.js Model might not make the most sense, due to overhead for communicating with servers and publish/subscribe, I came up with the term PODO, or Plain Old Domain Object. I see that a few people have already thought of it.

To me a Plain Old Domain Object is an object which doesn’t also have the responsibility of persisting itself, which Backbone Model objects and ActiveRecord objects are designed to do.

There are reasons why I find myself wanting to use a model object with persistence built in for complex models, but I think if I had the right storage middleware object I’d be comfortable without them. I’d want it to be based on patching rather than full updates. That way I could trigger only the behavior necessary in my PODOs for a given state change.