reading comments: Lazy Load

Lazy Load is one of the object relational behavioral patterns. With lazy load, an object does not contain all of the data you need but knows how to get it when it is needed. This pattern is commonly found in most of the OR mappers, e.g. Hibernate.

lazy initialization
With lazy initialization, every access to the field is checked against a special value, e.g. null value. If the value is not found, then the object needs to perform some logic, e.g. lookup from database, before returning.

virtual proxy
A virtual proxy is an object that looks like the object that should be in the field, but actually doesn’t contain anything. Only when one of it’s methods is called does it load the correct object from the database.

value holder
A value holder is used as a generic Lazy Load. It is an object that wraps some other object. To get the underlying object you ask the value holder for the value, and the first access will pull the data from the database.