Glossary

$

A JavaScript variable, defined by jQuery as a synonym for the jQuery object.

ActiveX

A Microsoft framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way.

Ajax

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. A web development technique to send data to, and retrieve data from, a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.

API

Application Programming Interface. A protocol intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other.

Assertion

A statement of an expected result in a unit test.

Base62 encoding

An encoding scheme that represents strings of characters as numbers in a base 62 sequence, using the characters 0 to 9, a to z, and A to Z as digits.

Behaviour

A JavaScript library that inspired jQuery.

Boolean

A data type consisting of the values true and false.

Callback

A reference to a piece of executable code that’s passed as an argument to other code, allowing a lower-level software layer to call a function defined in a higher-level later. In JavaScript these are often used in response to asynchronous events.

Canvas

An HTML5 element that allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images.

CDN

Content Delivery Network. A large distributed system of servers deployed to serve content to end users with high availability and high performance.

Chaining