I'm fairly new to programming and have been focussing a great deal on Java in recent months. I would like to write an application with a Java applet front end which will capture information about my users and allow for them to be organised for sporting events. This seems to lend itself very nicely to the object orientated approach (e.g. each user is an object, each event is an object, each coach is an object, etc.).
However, my users will all need to access and make changes to the data stored as objects. A database of some sort seems to be called for but I only really have experience with RDBMS and I can't see how that maps to an object based front end. I could just use PHP driven HTTP calls but that would mean translating objects into tables and that feels like a move away from a pure OO approach - and I'm really trying hard not to slip into a procedural way of thinking, which is more my background.
I'm vaguely aware of JSON and NOSQL databases but not enough to know whether they are the solution to my problem. So, given all of this, I would really appreciate any views on the best way to keep things OO whilst at the same time having a client/server model allowing shared access to the application's data. I'm sure there's an easy solution - I'm just struggling to find it!
Any tips/thoughts?