hybris populators and converters concept and their relationship

Question

Can someone please explain the concept of converters and populators used in the Hybris? I was going through the concept of AddOns in Hybris but one of the points said "You can plug populators into existing converters without having to redefine them" after we use AddOns in Hybris commerce accelerator? So I thought it`s better to understand these concepts first.

Answer 1

In a nutshell, converters are used to create data objects (DTOs) out of (mostly) model objects and populators are used to fill in the dtos.

You'll find a pretty good documentation of both concepts here for version 5: https://wiki.hybris.com/display/release5/Converters+and+Populators

Here for version 6: https://help.hybris.com/6.0.0/hcd/8b937ff886691014815fcd31ff1de47a.html

(If you don't have wiki access yet, you should get it as the wiki and the experts forum at https://experts.hybris.com are two essential resources to get a lot of answers from).

Cheers!