I like the actual website's description of the problem.
creates a 3th table to create the many to many...
3th? We need to create new words to describe the problem.
I actually thought about this a bit yesterday. It's not that unusual. Even my student/course scenario. What if you want to keep the grade for each student in each of their courses this way?
It's a neat scenario, but not unheard of, as you can see by the comments on the bottom of the page. Maybe it demonstrates the elegance of Hibernate and JPA in the fact that you can do it if you apply the framework/design creatively.
I do remember a CMP time when you wanted to do something, and the mapping tools simply said "we don't support that, and that's it."
I actually think I might add to my tutorial/chapter in my book about the many-to-many join column and add a little something like this. It scares me, but I also think it's kinda kewl.
-Cameron McKenzie [ July 20, 2008: Message edited by: Cameron Wallace McKenzie ]