Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Cornucopia of Acronyms

In the past 5 months of work as a software engineer, I would have encountered more than a hundred acronyms of various technologies. The interesting point is that these acronyms I've come across are only in the Java/J2ee world. I don't think that comes to me as a surprise given that I am at Sun Microsytems for the past 3 years. I was wondering how on earth would some ever be aware of all these acronyms at the first place leave alone the next big task of knowing what technology each of these acronyms stood for and what these technologies offer. It is mind boggling to even think of it. Just to give a sneak preview of what I've come across in the past months are, J2EE, J2SE, JAXP, JAXB, JAX-RPC, XML, SOAP, JMS, JMX, EJB, CMP, BMP, MDB, WSDL, UDDI, JXTA, JSR, JCP,JAR, EAR, WAR, etc. Of course, this list is not an exhaustive one (I have my own misgivings if anyone can come up with an exhaustive list). Microsoft needs a mention here as they are no way behind in their abundance for acronyms.

If you are not sure convinced about the number, take a look at this website and the information will leave you agape. http://www.developer.com/lang/article.php/3399521
I also found this interesting site on acronyms and you will find some interesting trivia there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

All said and done, acronyms have become a common thing in our lives (most relevant in the IT world) and though they have really gone out of our hand, we have to gracefully except them and keep the learning curve going higher and higher. While you are reading this, there are folks growing the list of acronyms!

BFN & BW ;)

6 comments:

Jax said...

Good da, nice to know you are learning something related to me by nomenclature. ;-)

Unknown said...

Well, some more putative acronyms by a techie:

GoK - God Only Konws

OHP - Over Head Projections (pun intended)

Srini said...

Well..if we are in the process of growing the list, my favourite is OHT-Over Head Transmission (from BITS!). But first..who is sym?

Fracture said...

You can also type
DEFINE:WORD
into Google. All hail Google.

My favourite from my line of business? POTS. You may have seen it painted on a road or manhole cover.

It stands for Plain Old Telephone Service. As in; Here there be phone lines.

Srini said...

sym is Sai..what a horrible sobriquet is that? change it man.

Srini said...

Hi Al,

Yes I do remember seeing the POTS and of course reading it in courses like Telcomm. Now each field has its one list of non-exhaustive acronyms.