Glossary/Portpedia

Porting
Porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed (e.g. different CPU, operating system, or third party library).

Migration
Migration in computer clusters, process migration, application migration, environment migration etc refers to what happens when a program is being moved from one of the cluster computers, system, environment, operating system to another

VB
Visual Basic (VB) is an event driven programming language and associated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model.

VC++
Microsoft Visual C++ (also known as MSVC) is an Integrated development environment (IDE) product for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages engineered by Microsoft. It has tools for developing and debugging C++ code, especially that written for the Microsoft Windows API, the DirectX API, and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

OWL
The Object Windows Library (OWL) was a Borland library, which was an object-oriented wrapper around the WinAPI. It was used in Turbo Pascal for Windows, Borland Pascal and their C++ package.

VFP
Visual FoxPro is a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language produced by Microsoft. It is derived from FoxPro (originally known as FoxBASE) which was developed by Fox Technologies

Itanium
The Itanium was a microprocessor produced by Intel in 2001–2002. It was the original implementation of the IA-64 architecture jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. It was superseded by the Itanium 2.

Opteron
The AMD Opteron (codenamed SledgeHammer during development) was the first of AMD's eighth-generation x86 processors based on the K8 or Hammer core, and the first processor to implement the AMD64 (formerly x86-64) instruction set architecture

X86
x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture, first developed and manufactured by Intel. It currently dominates the desktop, portable and small server markets, and has been used in personal computers since the 1980s IBM PC.

64-bit
In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are at most 64 bits (8 bytes) wide. Also, 64-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.

32-bit
In computer architecture, 32-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are at most 32 bits (4 octets) wide. Also, 32-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. 32-bit is also a term given.

16-bit
In computer architecture, 16-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are at most 16 bits (2 octets) wide. Also, 16-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.

Motif (GUI)
Motif is a widget toolkit for building graphical user interfaces under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a competitor to the OPEN LOOK GUI.
It is also an industry standard by the name IEEE 1295 (as the Motif API). It is the basic building block of the Common Desktop Environment. As of version 2.1 Motif supports Unicode, which has made it widely used in several multilingual environments

X11
In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Unix, Unix-like operating systems, and OpenVMS, and is supported by almost all other modern operating systems.

Xt
In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Unix, Unix-like operating systems, and OpenVMS, and is supported by almost all other modern operating systems.

XWindows
In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Unix, Unix-like operating systems, and OpenVMS, and is supported by almost all other modern operating systems.

Qt toolkit
In computer programming, Qt is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs, and, since the release of Qt 4, also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia and OPIE. It is produced by the Norwegian company Trolltech, formerly Quasar Technologies. Trolltech insiders pronounce Qt as "cute".

wxWidgets / wxWindows
In computing, wxWidgets ("Windows and X widgets", formerly known as wxWindows) is a free software/open source, cross-platform widget toolkit; that is, a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface (GUI).

Wind/U
Wind/U helps you to port your Windows API and MFC-based applications onto all popular flavors of UNIX, and Linux.

Hyperhelp
HyperHelp is a feature-rich online help development kit for UNIX and Linux. It lets you quickly and easily add a powerful hypertext online help system to your application. HyperHelp™ is WinHelp compatible. You can use the same RTF, help project, and bitmap source files with HyperHelp and WinHelp. This compatibility enables you to maintain a single source for your application's help system across Windows, UNIX, and Linux.

Xprinter
Xprinter™ is a developer's PostScript, PCL, and HPGL-2/RTL printer language library with an Xlib interface. Xprinter offers the same printing model found in Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh: programming for the display automatically provides printer support.

InterViews
InterViews is a native C++ toolkit for the X Window System developed by Mark Linton and his team at Stanford University and later Silicon Graphics. The last major release was InterViews 3.1 in 1993, and included the Unidraw drawing editor application framework which was the basis of John Vlissides' thesis work at Stanford. InterViews also has lightweight glyphs with switchable look-and-feel (Apple monochrome, Motif, OPEN LOOK, and SGI Motif). It has been ported to most any Unix which runs X11. Other programmers known to have worked on InterViews include Paul Calder, John Interrante, Steven Tang, and Scott Stanton.

Unix
Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system

Linux
Linux (IPA pronunciation: /ˈlɪnʊks/) is a Unix-like computer operating system family. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open source development; its underlying source code is available for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute freely.[1]

Redhat
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) is one of the largest and most recognized companies dedicated to open source software. It is also the largest distributor of the GNU/Linux operating system

SuSE
SUSE (pronounced IPA: [suzə], properly (in German), "SOO-za", loosely "SOO-sa" [1] in English) is a major retail Linux distribution, produced in Germany and owned by Novell, Inc. SUSE is also a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium.

Mac OS X
Mac OS X (official IPA pronunciation: /mæk.oʊ.ɛs.tɛn/) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc., the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS,

BSD Unix
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions

SCO Unix
SCO OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop (SCO ODT), is a closed source version of the Unix computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and now maintained by the SCO Group

Open source
The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with either relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through either incremental individual effort, or collaboration.

Solaris
Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is certified against the Single Unix Specification as a version of Unix, and although historically a closed-source project, has since been open-sourced by Sun Microsystems. It is now one of the largest open-source projects in the community, and it continues to grow in features, members, and applications

HP-UX
HP-UX (Hewlett Packard UniX) is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system,

IBM AIX
AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a proprietary operating system developed by IBM based on UNIX System V. Before the product was ever marketed, the acronym AIX originally stood for Advanced IBM UNIX.

IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. Based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions, it is capable of extremely long uptimes, and its XFS file system is regarded as one of the most advanced journaling file systems in the industry.

Mainframe
Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as Big Iron) are computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and financial transaction processing.

C
C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.

C++
C++ (pronounced "see plus plus", IPA: /siː plʌs plʌs/) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language with low-level facilities. It is a statically typed free-form multi-paradigm language supporting procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, generic programming and RTTI. Since the 1990s, C++ has been one of the most popular commercial programming languages.

COBOL
COBOL (pronounced 'COE-bol') is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

Fortran
Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications,

Perl
Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.[1]

GUI
A graphical user interface (GUI) allows for interaction with a computer or other media formats which employs graphical images, special graphical element devices called "widgets", along with text to represent the information and actions available to a user. The actions are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements.

Cluster
A computer cluster is a group of tightly coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.

UI
UNIX International or UI was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the Unix operating system. Its most notable members were AT&T and Sun Microsystems, and in fact the commonly accepted reason for its existence was as a counterbalance to the Open Software Foundation (OSF

Windows
Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft

SFU
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a software package produced by Microsoft which provides a Unix subsystem and other parts of a full Unix environment on Windows NT and its successors. The subsystem included is called Interix.

SUA
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications on a computer running a Windows Server 2003 R2. Because SUA provides an operating system for POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX) processes, administrators can compile and run their applications in SUA with little or no change to their original source code.

Interix
Interix is the name of an optional, full-featured POSIX and Unix environment subsystem for Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems. It is distributed as part of the free Services for Unix (SFU) toolkit for versions 3.0 and 3.5. The most recent release of Interix, version 5.2, is part of the Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Vista distributions with the moniker "SUA" [1] (Subsystem for Unix-based Applications)

Vista
Windows Vista is the latest release of Microsoft Windows, a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers,

Windows NT
Windows NT (New Technology) is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level, language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS until 2001. It was the first fully 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, are 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are the latest versions of Windows based upon the original Windows NT system, although they are not branded as Windows NT releases.

Windows XP
Windows XP is a line of proprietary operating systems developed by Microsoft for use on general-purpose computer systems, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, and media centers. The letters "XP" stand for eXPerience.[2] Codenamed "Whistler" after Whistler, British Columbia, as many Microsoft employees skied at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort during its development, Windows XP is the successor to both Windows 2000 and Windows Me, and is the first consumer-oriented operating system produced by Microsoft to be built on the Windows NT kernel and architecture. Windows XP was first released on October 25, 2001, and over 400 million copies are in use, according to a January 2006 estimate by an IDC analyst.[3] It is succeeded by Windows Vista, which was released to volume license customers on November 8, 2006, and worldwide to the general public on January 30, 2007.

Legacy code
Legacy code is source code that relates to a no-longer supported or manufactured operating system or other computer technology. The term can also mean code inserted into modern software for the purpose of maintaining an older or previously supported feature—for example supporting a serial interface even though many modern systems don't have a serial port. It may also be in the form of supporting older file formats that may have been encoding in non-ASCII characters, such as EBCDIC.

Thin client
A thin client, sometimes also called a lean client, is a computer (client) in client-server architecture networks which depends primarily on the central server for processing activities. The word "thin" refers to the small boot image which such clients typically require - perhaps no more than required to connect to a network and start up a dedicated web browser or "Remote Desktop" connection such as X11, Citrix ICA, Microsoft RDP or Nomachine

J2ee
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE (formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition or J2EE until the name was changed to Java EE in version 1.5), is a programming platform—part of the Java Platform—for developing and running distributed multitier architecture Java applications, based largely on modular software components running on an application server. The Java EE platform is defined by a specification. Similar to other Java Community Process specifications, Java EE is also considered informally to be a standard because providers must agree to certain conformance requirements in order to declare their products as Java EE compliant; albeit with no ISO or ECMA

Java
Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode, although compilation to native machine code is also possible

.NET
Microsoft .NET is an umbrella term that applies to a wide collection of products and technologies from Microsoft. Most have in common a dependence on the Microsoft .NET Framework, a component of the Windows operating system.

WebSphere
WebSphere refers to a brand of mostly[1] proprietary IBM software products, although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). WebSphere helped define the middleware software category and is designed to set up, operate and integrate e-business applications across multiple computing platforms using Web technologies. It includes both the run-time components (like WAS) and the tools to develop applications that will run on WAS.

WebLogic
Owned by BEA Systems, Inc, BEA Weblogic is a J2EE Platform product family that includes a J2EE application server- WebLogic Server, an enterprise portal - WebLogic Portal, an Enterprise Application Integration platform, a Transaction Server and Infrastructure - WebLogic Tuxedo, a Telecommunication Platform - WebLogic Communication Platform and also an HTTP web server for Unix, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and more.

SAMP
The acronym SAMP refers to a solution stack of software programs, commonly free software programs, used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers

LAMP
The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software programs, commonly free software programs, used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

Solaris x86
Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is certified against the Single Unix Specification as a version of Unix, and although historically a closed source project, has since been open sourced by Sun Microsystems. It is now one of the largest open source projects in the community, and continues to grow in both features, members and applications

Little endian, Big endian
In computing, endianness is the ordering used to represent some kind of data as a sequence of smaller units. Typical cases are the order in which integer values are stored as bytes in computer memory (relative to a given memory addressing scheme) and the transmission order over a network or other medium. When specifically talking about bytes, endianness is also referred to simply as byte order.

OLE
Object Linking and Embedding, a distributed object system and protocol developed by Microsoft (computer science)
Component Object Model (COM)
Component Object Model (COM) is a Microsoft platform for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in any programming language that supports the technology. The term COM is often used in the software development world as an umbrella term that encompasses the OLE, OLE Automation, ActiveX, COM+ and DCOM technologies. Although COM was introduced in 1993, Microsoft did not begin emphasizing the name COM until 1997.

DCOM
Distributed Component Object Model, a Microsoft proprietary technology for software components distributed across several networked computers to communicate with each other

Subversion
A revision control system which allows computer software to be developed in an incremental and controlled fashion by a distributed group of programmers. Also commonly referred to as svn or SVN, Subversion is designed specifically to be a modern replacement for CVS.[1] Subversion was created by CollabNet, who still maintain the project. The name "Subversion" is a trademark of CollabNet.[2]

Clearcase
Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (configuration management, SCM etc) of source code and other software development assets. It is developed by the Rational Software division of IBM. ClearCase forms the base of version control for many large and medium sized businesses and can handle projects with hundreds or thousands of developers, but the price is quite steep for smaller companies.

Samba
Samba is open-source software that allows a wide variety of computers to act as if they were a Windows file and print server. Samba currently runs on UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, OpenVMS, and other operating systems. It uses the TCP/IP protocol stack on the host server to provide the network connectivity with Windows clients and servers. The Samba platform provides an implementation of dozens of services and protocols including NetBIOS, SMB (Server Message Block), CIFS (Common Internet File System), DCE/RPC, a WINS server and the NT Domain Suite of protocols.

XAML in a world of interop
XAML has recently come to light as a Microsoft version of XML used to initialize objects. There may be some early indications of an interoperability play for XAML. It is fairly robust technology - and thus not necessarily easy to develop. We are talking XML and objects here. As Ted Neward said earlier this year at The ServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas: "XAML is effectively a way to create an object model."