Glossary and Acronyms

In this section, many terms and acronyms used throughout this document are briefly defined.

For more details on the various web technology terms and acronyms found on this page, visit www.w3.org.

Table 1. Terminology
Term Description
CSS Cascading style sheets. CSS is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.
DTD Document Type Definition. The purpose of a DTD is to define the legal building blocks of an XML document. It defines the document structure with a list of legal elements and attributes.
DUA Driver User Agent.
DVM The Dynamic Virtual Machine or Runtime System that is installed on the Application Server and executes the application program.
GAD Genero ADministration Application. This application is accessed by clicking on the Administration tab on the Genero Application Server Welcome Page (demos.html).
GAS Genero Application Server. Defined by the computer system that houses the Dynamic Virtual Machine (DVM).
GDC Genero Desktop Client.
GDCAX Genero Desktop Client / Active X.
GWC Genero Web Client. A client technology that renders the application in an HTML Graphical User Interface (browser).
GWS Genero Web Services. A web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet and uses a standardized XML messaging system. XML is used to encode all communications to a web service. For example, a client invokes a web service by sending an XML message, then waits for a corresponding XML response. Because all communication is in XML, web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language--Java can talk with Perl; Windows® applications can talk with Linux®/UNIX™ applications. See also SOA.
HTML Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML file is a text file containing markup tags. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page.
JavaScript JavaScript is a scripting language designed to add interactivity to HTML pages. A JavaScript consists of lines of executable computer code that can be embedded directly into HTML pages. It is an interpreted language, meaning that the scripts execute without preliminary compilation. Most browsers support JavaScript, and anyone can use JavaScript without purchasing a license.
SOA Service-Oriented Architecture. In SOA, autonomous, loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services with well-defined interfaces provide business functionality and can be discovered and accessed through a supportive infrastructure. This allows internal and external system integration as well as the flexible reuse of application logic through the composition of services to support an end-to-end business process.
SUA Sending User Agent.
User Agent A User Agent is a client agent. It can be a browser or the Genero Desktop Client.
Web Server A computer that delivers (serves up) Web pages. Every web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name. For example, if you enter the URL http://www.mycompany.com in your browser, this sends a request to the server whose domain name is mycompany.com. The server then fetches the home page and sends it to your browser. Any computer can be turned into a web server by installing server software and connecting the machine to the Internet.
WSDL Web Services Description Language. WSDL is an XML-based language for describing Web services and how to access them.
XML Short for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations. For more information, please refer to the W3C web site at www.w3.org.
XML Schema XML Schema is an XML-based alternative to a DTD . An XML Schema describes the structure of an XML document. The XML Schema language is also referred to as XML Schema Definition (XSD).
XHTML EXtensible HyperText Markup Language. XHTML is aimed to replace HTML. XHTML is almost identical to HTML 4.01. XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML. XHTML is HTML defined as an XML application.
XPath XPath is a language for navigating in XML documents.
XSD See XML Schema.
XSL XML Style Sheets. XML does not use predefined tags (you can use any tag names you wish), and the meaning of these tags are not well understood. For example, a <table> element could mean an HTML table, a piece of furniture, or something else - and a browser does not know how to display it. XSL describes how the XML document should be displayed.
XSLT XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into XHTML documents or to other XML documents.