We are a group of 4 software development students currently studying at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Currently, we are tasked with developing a web application that functions as a online store. We decided to do the back-end in Java while making use of Google Guice for persistence(which is mostly irrelevant for my question). The general idea so far to use PHP to create the website.

We decided that we would like to try, after handing in the project, and register a business to actually implement the website.

The problem we have been experiencing is with the domain model. These are mostly small issues, however they are starting to impact the schedule of our project. Since we are all young IT students, we have virtually no experience in the business world. As such, we spend quite a significant amount of time planning the domain model in the first place. Now, some of the issues we're picking up is say the reference between the Customer entity and the order entity. Currently, we don't have the customer id in the order entity and we have a list of order entities in the customer entity.

Lately, I have wondered if the persistence mechanism will put the client id physically in the order table, even if it's not in the entity? So, I started wondering, if you load a customer object, it will search the entire order table for orders with the customer's id. Now, say you have 10 000 customers and 500 000 orders, won't this take an extremely long time? There are also some business processes that I'm not completely clear on.

Finally, my question is: does anyone know of a sample domain model out there that is similar to what we're trying to achieve that will be safe to look at as a reference? I don't want to be accused of stealing anybody's intellectual property, especially since we might implement this as a business.