Confusion of terms

At my present assignment I work with a seasoned senior. One of my current tickets will have some impact on the @Controller layer of the application, so I casually stated that I wanted to redo the DTO's (data transfer objects). In the application that I'm working on DTO's are used to transfer data from clients to the application.

After which we got into a discussion, which ended up being more a case of miscommunication than an actual arguments. Question marks were put to my idea of adjusting the DTO's. At that moment he thought I wanted to adjust the objects responsible for representing data in our data source (db). Apparently it's also common practice to call these objects DTO's in some applications, especially if you work with a DAO (Data Access Object) pattern.

To confuse the matter even further, I said that I didn't want to adjust the models too much. In the application that I was talking about models (also) represent data to be saved in the database. I am only using repositories at the moment,  a different pattern data related pattern than DAO pattern. In the application that he is working on though, models are part of the MVC pattern. In the MVC pattern models can also used to transfer data to a front-end.

In dev terms we were talking about implementation of interfaces (service model vs mvc model, client facing dto vs datasource facing dto), but calling them interfaces. The thing is, when we zoomed out a little and started talking about what we wanted to achieve and the different layers of responsibility within our respective applications, we were saying exact the same thing :p . I think there are some lessons here... maybe even a few.

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