A glossary and acronym expansion project, (a work in progress) designed to highlight some of the important acronyms and concepts from my current studies of XML, Data Warehousing and distributed computing.
ActiveX Controls: Microsoft component-based objects. Can be written using Visual Basic, Borland's Delphi or PowerBuilder.
API: Applications Programming Interface, an interface that enables programs to communicate with each other.
AMI: Application Messenging Interface, IBM's high-level messenging interface (part of IBM's MQSeries); adopted by the Open Applications Group Inc. (AOGI) for the Open Applications Group Middleware API Specification (OAGMAS)
Application Servers: Encapsulate the complexities of distributed applications. Will be the development target for large-scale distributed systems during the next few years.
ASP: Active Server Pages, a Microsoft server side sript that creates and uses available components on the IIS (Microsoft Information Server) and MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server) platforms.
BPM: Business Process Modeling, A method used to model existing business processes using analysis-level dynamic modeling techniques.
Business Objects: Reusable objects or Server components that encapsulate business logic. Whether written in Java, an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) or packaged as an ActiveX Control.
CASE: Computer Aided Software Engineering
CBD: Component-based Development, Allows easier creation of reliable maintanable systems. Assembling applications, in whole or part, from existing components that are reusable, executable packages of software with well-defined interfaces. Component-based applications are often assembled using visual tools.
CGI: Common Gateway Interface, a stateless protocol- first generation web-enables access to database
COM: Component Object Model, (a Microsoft standard) Interface-based object-oriented language which separates the interface from the implementation. A language-independent way to describe and define interfaces and objects. UML can be used to construct the deliverable model. Microsoft standard underlying DCOM and ActiveX technologies.
Components: Components bring with them most of the advantages of object-oriented technology; extensive reuse, increased productivity and higher quality software. Typically packaged as Java applets or ActiveX controls. Components often allow programmers to assemble applications using visual design tools. Components allow programmers to use services (even those running on remote machines) in a consistent way. Components should not depend upon the behavior of other components. Components hve a well-defined interface. Verticle components - also known as business rule objects.
Component Broker: IBM's object broker for application integration
CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Object Management Group Distributed object services for distributed component systems.Corba is the foundation upon which the EJB platform is built. All major application server vendors (IBM, Oracle, Netscape/Sun, BEA, Inprise, Sybase) are embedding a CORBA implementation into their products. CORBA will increasingly converge with the EJB standard. CORBA is decreasing in importance as a separate standard. CORBA has become the essential protocol for building distributed, platform-independent enterprise applications.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
CSS1: Cascading Style Sheets, A presentation method used to format Web pages. An extension to HTML 4.0.
CTM: Component Transaction Monitors
DBMS: Database Management System
DCOM: Distributed Component Object Model, (Microsoft) Windows-centric,- no persistent object reference - no access to distributed naming services
DOCTYPE: Document Type Declaration
DOM: Document Object Model, A language independent API for managing HTML and XML documents allowing navigation of XML of HTML document structure and content. Object-oriented modeL that specifies interfaces to object behavior, attributes and relationships. Becoming available on non-Microsoft OSs. DOM defines a high-level set of objects that provide an interface between scripting languages and the browser's internal objects.
DSI: Dynamic Skeleton Interface
DTD: Data Type Description, XML-based (written in XML) document descriptions against which XML documents are validated.DTDs have been defined for: Automotive (J2008) Aviation (ATA 100, AECMA) Publishing (ISO 12083, Majour) Software Documentation (DocBook) HTML is a DTD
ECM: Enterprise Component Modeling, A framework and methodology for building iterative model-driven multi-tiered enterprise-scalable applications. ECM employs object technology and component-based development techniques to incrementally build and deliver an application throughout seven phases. Conceptualization, Requirements Analysis, System Design, Object Design, Construction, Testing and Deployment.
EDFD: Entity Data Flow Diagram
EJB: Enterprise Java Beans. A standard distributed component model. The encapsulation of business logic into business objects is the most recent focus of the information Technology industry. Objectified business logic. Server components that adddress critical business functions.
ERP: Enterprisewide Resource Planning
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, HTML is a subset of SGML. It is language for describing the presentation or display of data on a World Wide Web browser.
HTTP: HyperText Transport Protocol
IDE: Integrated Development Environment, Built-in software development environments, like Computer Asisted Software Engineering (CASE tools)
IDL: Interface Description Language
IIOP: Internet Inter-ORB Protocol, [ CORBA IIOP 1.0 ] Internet Inter-ORB Protocol 1.2, a communications protocol for CORBA that makes efficient use of network connections by allowing the client to make a request to the server and then allowing the server to call back to the client on the same connection.
IRL: Interface Resource Locator
Java: - A platform independent object-oriented programming language. Java programs are compiled into machine-independent bytecode then interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine.
JavaBeans: A component like any other with the exception that it is written in Java. Therefore the component can run on any machine with a Java Virtual Machine (Java VM). Each JavaBean has a set of properties that clients can get or set; these properties can be either single objects or arrays.
Java RMI: Remote Method Invocation, Java's method of invoking standalone server components.
JDBC: Java Database Connectivity, Vendor-independent seamless Java connectivity to SQL relational databases enabled through the use of native database drivers
JDBM: Java Database Management
JINI: Java Naming and Directory Interface
JMS: Java Messenging Service, Java interface to Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) products.
Libraries: A popular way to package code for reuse. Object Libraries: class libraries - the foundation for reuse in object-oriented languages. (Components are simpler to understand and generally easier to use than class libraries) Components are distributed in reusable code in an executable format (source coed is not required) ensuring that programmers using the component cannot modify the code.
Life Cycles: Analysis, design, implementation, testing.
Message Broker: IBM MQSeries is the best known and perhaps the de-facto standard message handling system.
Middleware: - Application Server A server that centralizes and consolidates application services. Web servers create tiered environment by being between a browser client and database server. Software that facilitates the communication between two applications. It provides an API through which applications invoke services and it controls the transmission of the data exchange over the network. There are three basic types: communications middleware, database middleware and systems middleware.
MOM: Message Oriented Middleware, Message brokers, actually break messages into pieces and hand off pieces of data to applications.
MTS: Microsoft Transaction Server Microsofts server-side component-based in-process transaction server.
AOGI:Open Applications Group Inc. Formed in 1995, OAGI's mission is to create standards for the interoperability of enterprise software packages such as ERP.
OCL: Object Constraint Language, A specification for describing objects developed by IBM as a language for business modeling. OCL is used within UML to help formalize the semanticsof the language itself.
ODBC: Open Database Connectivity - uses native database drivers
OMG: Object Management Group, A standards body for object oriented computing and management. They maintain and support CORBA, UML and other open standards. OMG
OOPL: Object Oriented Programming Language
ORB: Object Request Broker, is software that allows objects to dynamically discover each other and interact across machines, operating systems and networks.
OTM: Object Transaction Monitor
PGML: Precision Graphics Markup Language, XML-based description of vector graphics.
RDF: Resource Description Framework Defines metadata structures (data about data)
RMI: Remote Method Invocation, A lightweight proprietary, rather than language neutral, messenging service can only talk to other RMI objects. Incapable of supporting support dynamic invocations and interface repositories (IR).
SAX: (Simple API for XML), Provides a standardized interface for the interaction of applications with many XML tools. SAX uses two basic types of objects, Parser and DocumentHandlers
SGML: Standard Generalized Markup Language, An international standard since 1986 (ISO 8879) is a meta-language used to create new languages by marking up information of any kind.
Tier: (n-Tier), an environment featuring multiple servers - middleware server, web server application server, database server legacy
TPM: Transaction Processing Monitor, provides communications services for applications
UML: Unified Modeling Language, (currently UML V1.1)
Adopted in November 1997 by the Object Management Group (OMG) as
their standard for expressing object-oriented analysis and design
decisions. UML provides. UML is a visual modeling, as well as
notation, specifying,modeling and documenting object-oriented and
component-based system architectures. UML is powerfull modeling
language that focuses on system architecture and design.
Microsoft Visual Studio 6 ships with a low-end UML Modeler
Platinum Paradigm Plus is UML V1.1 complient with meta model view
(90%), notation view (90-95) and diagram view (100%).
UML is the result of the unification of three major object-oriented
modeling systems Booch, OMT (Object Modeling Technique) and OOSE
(Object-Oriented Software Engineering).
Rational Rose - A UML tool
Use Case Model: Views system functionality from the end users perspective. Constructed when determining system requirements then used and refined throughout the development cycle. Use cases afftec the entire system development.
Web Application: A Web application uses a web site as the front-end to a more typical application. In a web application client data input executes business logic on the server.
WIDL: Web Interface Description Language, A Language that defines and standardizes HTTP interactions (requests and responses) between two applications.
W3C: World Wide Web Consortium, W3C
XAS: XML-AS, XML Application Server
XML: eXtensible Markup Language, A subset of SGML. XML is an extensible meta-language enabling the interchange of self-describing structured information for use in other applications or presentation.XML makes information Web-capable. XML documents can be formulated to be automatically verifiable.
XML-Data: A public submission vying as a standard for an XML schema language. It includes an inheritence mechanism for describing classes of XML elements.
XLink: eXtended Links, An XML LInk Language that extends links beyond the capability of HTML-links. enables more specific classification of links and link targets as well as presentation, transformation, and conversion with applications.
XPointer: XML Pointer Language, Used to describe the relationship between information units. A means to interchange structured content.
XML-Schema: An important tool for describing data structures. Schemas are document definitions that exceed DTDs in capability by providing relationships between documents and data types XML-Schemas describe a standard method to define the structure and rules of documents in the same fashion as a DTD. They are extended document type definitions coded directly in XML.
XSL: eXtensible Style Language, Used to create presentation layouts for XML documents. XSL exceeds the pure layout definition by providing means to transform, hide and change the sequence elements in the display.
Date Created: 19 October 1999
Last Modified: 19 October 1999; MRT