Words About Acronyms

When network computing started in full force, in the 1980s, the information systems community was suddenly deluged with acronyms--TCP, SNA, IP, and so on became everyday words. The development of distributed computing in the 1990s, and especially the advent and popularity of Java in the late 1990s, have added to what has become a veritable "acronym overload". Some of these acronyms become quite clear and explanatory when expanded--JNDI and IDE are two examples. Other acronyms are puzzling to newcomers, even when expanded; CORBA is a good example.

This guide is, inevitably, filled with acronyms. The acronyms are expanded when first used in a chapter and are defined as required, but this is often of little help to those who do not read serially, especially to those accessing this Guide on-line.

For this reason, this Guide supplies an appendix ("Abbreviations and Acronyms") that lists the acronyms used in this guide--CORBA, EJB, JNDI, JTS, and so on--as well as many others that are in common use in the computer literature, such as ASCII, DCE, DDL, and GUI.

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