Monday, July 29, 2002		ITerminology

Glass house: Originally used to refer to the large windowed rooms that contained an enterprise’s mainframe computers and other hardware devices necessary for data storage and processing, today the term refers generally to the centrally administered computing environments of enterprises. As computers have gotten smaller and can be fit into smaller spaces, they are no longer housed in centralized rooms surrounded by glass windows as they were as early as the 1950s. However, the terms glass house is still used to describe an enterprise’s centrally controlled computing environment.

CVS: Short for Concurrent Versions System, an open-source, network-transparent program that allows developers to keep track of different development versions of source code. CVS does not maintain multiple versions of source code files but keeps a single copy and records of all of the changes that are made. When a developer wants a particular development version of a file, CVS will reconstruct that version based on its records. Bugs can often get into code when it is modified and may not be detected until long after the modification is made. CVS can retrieve old versions of the code, allowing the developer to see precisely which change caused the bug. CVS is also useful when more than one person is working on a specific file, where it is possible for the developers to overwrite each other’s changes.

UIML: Short for User Interface Markup Language, a markup language extension of XML that promotes the creation of Web pages that can be viewed on any kind of interface device, from PC monitors to smart phones to PDAs. Using UIML style sheets, Web content can be created once without knowing specifically which devices it will be viewed on. A developer uses UIML to describe elements of the user interface — such as menus, buttons and input boxes. A programmer then can write applications that rely on UIML to get the content to different devices.