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Information Technology Glossary of
Terms
- CGI: the Common Gateway Interface, How a
web server runs a script or program and sends the output to a web browser,
particularly the current very klunky way to pass forms-entries around
the Web within HTML. It's why the user sees very long cryptic lines
in the "Location:" browser field, it's slow, it demands annoying "cookies".
A cleaner alternative is included in CORBA. http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/cgi/,
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/
- CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture,
a standard and an infrastructure for components (programs) that cooperate
across the web in a "three-tiered" model (client, server, and middleware:
e.g. the broker-middleman). Establishes an "object-oriented" framework,
a standard for its objects to describe themselves upon query, essentially
how these web-aware objects must look from the outside, and how they
play together. http://www.omg.org/corba/beginners.html
- GUI: Graphical User Interface, which typically
consists of a linked set of window-based forms (widgets) containing
graphically displayed activation objects such as pull-down menus, directory
browsing filters, tables, sliders, dials, and push buttons, that allow
a user to see and modify numerical and text inputs in an intuitive way,
and to similarly select and perhaps plot portions of the output from
a process. http://medicalcomputingtoday.com/0agui.html
- IDL: Interface Description Language: how
web-objects' interfaces are written, something like a contract. This
"language" establishes interface data types (similar to the types definable
in C++), not data processing (it doesn't describe math operations or
loops). Not to be confused with Research Systems Inc's Interactive Data
Language, which is a commercial scientific visualization package. http://www.omg.org/corba/cichpter.html,
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/idl/intro/intro.html
- IIOP: Internet Inter-ORB Protocol: the standard
protocol that specifies how web-objects communicate across TCP/IP networks.
http://www.omg.org/corba/cichpter.html
- Java: A web-friendly object-oriented programming
language. By the mechanism of the Java Virtual Machine, Java applications
are portable to virtually any computer system. Java is commonly used
to write applets. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html
- Legion: "a worldwide virtual computer."
U. Virginia object-based metasystem, aims to make "millions of hosts
and trillions of data objects" appear to any user as a single computer.
A particular approach to making network connected resources available
easily; not clear if GEM would use, or just learn lessons from them
on how to do what we want to do. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~legion/
- Nile: (calls itself "National Challenge
Computing Project", not an acronym): 24 institutions including Cornell,
UTexas, are using CORBA, widely distributed workstations and data (aim
is for 100 Terabytes in a distributed database) to cooperate seemlessly
to support High Energy Physics computations within the CLEO project.
"Nile will allow any resource to be accessed and used transparently
by any member of the collaboration, from anywhere within the collaboration."
May be a good model for GEM to learn from; at first glance, looks much
like what we want to do, but in a different field of science. http://www.nile.cornell.edu/
- POOMA: Parallel Object Oriented Methods
and Applications: Los Alamos' approach to doing parallel scientific
computing by using high-level object descriptions of operations. The
aim is high portability: express the work to be done conceptually in
this way, and you can debug on a workstation, but run immediately on
a massively parallel computer. Currently does things like particle plasma
simulations on the DOE ASCI machines (the very biggest parallel computers).
A possible model for the very high performance part of GEM code development.
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/PoomaFramework/
- Object web: A mosaic of emerging software
technologies nucleating around the internet, Java, and CORBA which can
be used to build potentially huge distributed systems upon cooperating
heterogeneous computers. Termed an eventual "computer heaven" by the
authors of the web-book referenced below, but currently embrionic and
very much "under construction". Therefore it's as full of pitfalls as
promise. http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/shrideep/book/
- POOMA: Parallel Object Oriented Methods
and Applications: Los Alamos' approach to doing parallel scientific
computing by using high-level object descriptions of operations. The
aim is high portability: express the work to be done conceptually in
this way, and you can debug on a workstation, but run immediately on
a massively parallel computer. Currently does things like particle plasma
simulations on the DOE ASCI machines (the very biggest parallel computers).
A possible model for the very high performance part of GEM code development.
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/PoomaFramework/
- XML: eXtensible Markup Language. A new emerging
Web standard markup language, already under adoption by Microsoft, IBM,
Oracle and many others. While originally developed for document presentation,
XML may be well applied to the organization of scientific data both
locally and across the Web. Some benefits of using XML are separation
of data from presentation,commercial product support, improved search
capability, platform independence, ease-of-use, and ease-of-maintenance.
http://www.xml.com/xml/pub,
http://www.w3.org/XML/
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