Project-specific Terms

ACR

n. Average Customer Rating. The mathematical mean of all product ratings for a given product. It is a floating point value ranging from 1 to 5. The value 0.00 is used when there are no ratings.

Architechural Layer or Tier

The architechural layer generally encapsulates a software application's technical complexities independent of the business logic, thereby providing a loose coupling between the business functionality and the underlying technical infrastructure. Layered architectures contribute to the high availability of software infrastructures by enabling components to detect failure of components in adjacent layers: this in turns insulates architectural components and protects them from failures in other layers.

AVSI

n. The Address Verification System Interface: a component that interfaces our shipping and billing logic to the credit card processor's server for verification of card-holder addresses.

Builder

Make and return one object various ways. The builder pattern assembles a number of objects to make a new object, based on the data with which it is presented. Frequently, the choice of which way the objects are assembled is achieved using a Factory.

BusinessDelegate

The Business Delegate acts as a client-side business abstraction; it provides an abstraction for, and thus hides, the implementation of the business services. Using a Business Delegate reduces the coupling between presentation-tier clients and the system's business services. Depending on the implementation strategy, the Business Delegate may shield clients from possible volatility in the implementation of the business service API. Potentially, this reduces the number of changes that must be made to the presentation-tier client code when the business service API or its underlying implementation changes.

Business Layer

A classification for an architechural layer where business logic and rules are processed

Command Pattern

The Command pattern provides a simple way to separate execution of a command from the interface environment that produced it.In the command pattern an object encapsulates everything needed to execute a method in another object.

DataAccessObject

The DAO implements the access mechanism required to work with the data source. The data source could be a persistent store like an RDBMS, an external service like a B2B exchange, a repository like an LDAP database, or a business service accessed via CORBA Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) or low-level sockets. The business component that relies on the DAO uses the simpler interface exposed by the DAO for its clients. The DAO completely hides the data source implementation details from its clients. Because the interface exposed by the DAO to clients does not change when the underlying data source implementation changes, this pattern allows the DAO to adapt to different storage schemes without affecting its clients or business components. Essentially, the DAO acts as an adapter between the component and the data source.

Data Layer

A classification for an architechural layer where data centric logic is processed

Data Store

The data storage system which represents a persistent store like an RDBMS, an external service like a B2B exchange, a repository like an LDAP database, or a business service accessed via CORBA Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) or low-level sockets.

Dependency injection (DI)

(DI) in Computer programming refers to the process of supplying an external dependency to a software component. It is a specific form of inversion of control where the concern being inverted is the process of obtaining the needed dependency.

Conventionally, if an object needs to gain access to a particular service, the object takes responsibility to get hold of that service: either it holds a direct reference to the location of that service, or it goes to a known 'service locator' and requests that it be passed back a reference to an implementation of a specified type of service. By contrast, using dependency injection, the object simply provides a property that can hold a reference to that type of service; and when the object is created a reference to an implementation of that type of service will automatically be injected into that property - by an external mechanism.

Extensible application model

This infers that the framework is developed to be extended. The coupling of the individual components is loose and allows for extension of most core classes and the addition of new objects.

Identity management

Deals with the management of user credentials and the means by which users might log on to a system.

Internal Messaging

A messaging system which can only be accessed by users who are logged into the system

Inversion of control, or IoC

This is a software design pattern and set of associated programming techniques in which the flow of control of a system is inverted in comparison to the traditional interaction model, expressed in imperative programming in the form of a series of procedure calls. Thus, instead of a series of events being specified to occur during the lifetime of a process by the means of function calls, the desired responses are registered to particular events, after which some external entity or entities take control over the precise order and set of things that are to be carried out. In a sense, inversion of control follows what has been referred to as the "Hollywood Principle"—"don't call us, we will call you".

Localized Messages

This refers to the messages which are generated by the system in a locale based fashion, allowing individual users to view messages based on their specific language determined by the information sent by the user to the system.

Object based security model

This refers to the fact that certain objects within the framework have implied object and role based security features derived from java.security.permission

Order-line

n. One line on a customer order, consisting of a product name, price, and quantity.

Presentation Layer or Tier

A classification for an architechural layer where presentation logic and components are rendered

Principal

A security principal is an entity that can be positively identified and verified via a technique known as authentication

Product

n. An item from the product catalog offered for sale on a shopping site. Each product has a unique SKU number, name, description, and regular price.

Product catalog

n. A database of all products offered for sale on a shopping site.

Proxy

This normally provides a simple place-holder class for a more complex class which is expensive to instantiate. The framework uses a proxy to instantiate and manage the life cycle of DAOs used within the framework.

Registered user

n. A person who has registered with us in the past. Attributes include real name, user name, encrypted password, billing information, recent ship-to address, recent orders, and corporate account authorizations. See visitor.

Resource bundles

This are locale based java properties files and accessible by the ResourceBundle class.

Resource security model

Resources in java can have implied security restrictions. Spine allows for this restrictions to be integrated directly into components which are derived from resources.

Reviewer standing

Computed attribute of user based on meta-moderation of product reviews written by this user. Used to determine priority in product review comments. Only the "Top 100" reviewer standing is ever displayed to any end-users.

Real-world meaning of values:

Newbie	Less than 10 people liked his/her reviews
Critic	Between 11 and 200 liked them
Pundit	More than 201 liked them
Top 100	User is in the top 100 when sorted by number of positive meta-moderation points

Role

Defines a role in a role based access control system. This is analogus to a group but goes further to assign a set of transactions for specific roles.

Service Locator

The Service Locator abstracts the API lookup (naming) services, vendor dependencies, lookup complexities, and business object creation, and provides a simple interface to clients. This reduces the client's complexity. In addition, the same client or other clients can reuse the Service Locator.

Sequential processing

Also known as serial processing, sequential processing is a term used to describe the processing that occurs in the order that it is received.

Struts

v. An MVC2 java framework designed to facilitate ease of development of web application by providing an extensible set of classes used to develop web applications.
Further reading is available at the  apache foundation website

Subscribe

v. A special type of purchase where the product is a subscription product, and there is no existing subscription.

Subscription product

n. A special type of product that has a certain number of recurring fulfillments between the purchase date and the expiration date. QUESTION: how shall we represent publication frequency?

TransferObject

The TransferObject is an arbitrary serializable Java object referred to as a Transfer Object. A Transfer Object class may provide a constructor that accepts all the required attributes to create the Transfer Object. The constructor may accept all entity bean attribute values that the Transfer Object is designed to hold. Typically, the members in the Transfer Object are defined as public, thus eliminating the need for get and set methods. If some protection is necessary, then the members could be defined as protected or private, and methods are provided to get the values. By offering no methods to set the values, a Transfer Object is protected from modification after its creation. If only a few members are allowed to be modified to facilitate updates, then methods to set the values can be provided. Thus, the Transfer Object creation varies depending on an application's requirements. It is a design choice as to whether the Transfer Object's attributes are private and accessed via getters and setters, or all the attributes are made public.

TransferObjectAssembler

The Transfer Object Assember constructs a composite Transfer Object that represents data from different business components. The Transfer Object caries the data for the model to the client in a single method call. Since the model data can be complex, it is recommended that this Transfer Object be immutable. That is, the client obtains such Transfer Objects with the sole purpose of using them for presentation and processing in a read-only manner. Clients are not allowed to make changes to the Transfer Objects.

Transposable application model

This refers to the ability of the framework to allow the transposition of objects along it's flow path via configuration.

Visitor

n. A person who is visiting a website but has not yet logged in. Each visitor creates a session on the server, some of these sessions will become associated with a registered user, but most will not.

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