Box 1.
Definitions
| CORBA | Common Object Request Broker Architecture: A set of software standards and tools to act as middleware helping the creation and interaction of software components. Large programs being designed today may have so many dependencies and interconnections that they could become difficult to maintain. CORBA hides the complexity within each part of a program and simplifies the discovery and integration of groups of components needed to solve specific tasks. CORBA sits between components (hence, the term middleware) and provides programming language independence, location independence, and a set of commonly used services. |
| Dynamic HTML | A heterogeneous collection of technologies to make HTML pages less static and able to change once downloaded into a client web browser (includes JavaScript and cascading style sheets) |
| Java | A modern, object-oriented, web-centric compiled programming language that is perhaps uniquely able to run on almost all computers from humble PCs up to mainframes. Java is a full, complex language that can be used to write any normal application on any computer, although it may be slower than some alternatives. Java was designed with the Internet in mind and has a sophisticated security model allowing users to rapidly download software (applets) and run it locally with very little risk. Programs running locally can be much more responsive than programs running across the Internet. |
| JavaScript | A simple interpreted computer language that can run in a WWW browser, where it can generate interactive HTML pages and control the content and checking of HTML objects like forms, applets, and cookies. Originally not directly related to Java, but they share a similar syntax, and complement each other’s abilities. Furthermore, a typical JavaScript implementation will have limited access to the public internals of Java applet classes embedded in any downloaded HTML page. |
| Firewall | A firewall is commonly a computer with two network cards running special software to monitor and control data going between a private intranet and the public Internet. The main purpose is usually to stop hackers from damaging internal computers or gaining access to private data. |
| IIOP | Internet Inter-ORB Protocol is the standardized way that ORBs from different vendors can talk to each other and so pass messages between clients and servers, etc. |
| IDL | Interface Definition Language is the specification language that is used to define the links between software components. A server will define in IDL all the objects and services it can offer, whereas a client will use the IDL to learn both what a server can provide and how to ask for it. |
| ORB | An Object Request Broker is the piece of software that does all the linking between components when a program is actually running. One part of the program might be running in one location, on one kind of computer, and be written in one language, whereas the other component might be different in every respect but the ORB can still let them interact without either component being involved in any intermediary conversion and navigation process. |
| XML | Extensible Mark-up Language is a text based format for storing and sharing documents and data of any kind and so extends on HTML the language in which all existing WWW pages are written. HTML documents may contain text, graphics, Java applet classes, or data for proprietary plug-ins, but XML pages are completely extensible to any kind of content because XML acts as a metalanguage allowing the creation of specialized content languages for things not normally displayed in web pages such as scientific data, or database records. XML is a subset of the even more abstract SGML. |
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