terminology

A lot of identity management implementations use roles in addition to groups. How are they different? So far I haven't found a compelling use case for separating the two. All the explanations I've read are vague and hand-wavey. Can you give a good example where having roles and groups are necessary? Person - Group - Roles A person is a member of one or more groups. A group is assigned multiple roles. Example: Two roles exist in a system stock_purchaser , timecard_supervisor . Two groups exist in a system shift_supervisor , regional_manager . regional_manager has the stock_purchaser and

What does the State Transfer in Representational State Transfer refer to? Found some explanations about this (e.g. here ) but I still don't understand. For example in the article it is said The representation places the client application in a state. Why? What does state (as I understand it, something like a session) have to do with a representation of a resource? Why? What does state (as I understand it, something like a session) have to do with a representation of a resource? An object has attributes (or state) and behaviors (or methods). If I want to move an object from my desktop to a

I recently asked a question about what I called "method calls". The answer referred to "messages". As a self-taught hobby programmer trying to phrase questions that don't make me look like an idiot, I'm realizing that the terminology that I use reveals a lot about how I learned to program. Is there a distinction between the various terms for methods/messages/etc. in OO programming? Is this a difference that comes from different programming languages using different terminology to describe similar concepts? I seem to remember that in pre-OO languages, a distinction would sometimes be made

Is parallel programming == multithread programming? Multithreaded programming is parallel, but parallel programming is not necessarily multithreaded. Unless the multithreading occurs on a single core, in which case it is only concurrent. Not necessarily . You can distribute jobs between multiple processes and even multiple machines - I wouldn't class that as "multi-threaded" programming as each process may only use a single thread, but it's certainly parallel programming. Admittedly you could then argue that with multiple processes there are multiple threads within the system as a whole...

I'm curious why GitHub calls submissions to merge, "Pull requests." From my understanding, git pull will pull all changes, from a remote repository, into a current working branch. Then merge those changes with FETCH_HEAD . ( Git Pull ) So taking a look at git push ... a push would actually push committed changes to a repository. And isn't that what you are doing with a Git repo? Submitting a "request" to merge your code? So why isn't it called a "Push request"? The term “pull requests” comes from the distributed nature of how many open source projects organize themselves. Instead of just

This post is related to an earlier post of wanting to learn how to properly render in between LIBGDX and Box2D. I had to understand viewport well before I could proceed. After much code/post readings, I felt the meaning of "viewport" was "the rectangle opening of a lens of the camera that views LIBGDX's Game world, where I can move it about the world to view what I want". But, after more reading, I seemed to be nowhere near the actual meaning. I've read the LIBGDX wiki, and read in the OpenGL documentation, which seem to explain viewport as being two different things. LIBGDX Wiki: "The

While reading the QTKit Application Programming Guide I came across the term 'headless environments' - what does this mean? Here is the passage: ...including applications with a GUI and tools intended to run in a “headless” environment. For example, you can use the framework to write command-line tools that manipulate QuickTime movie files. "Headless" in this context simply means without a graphical display. (i.e.: Console based.) Many servers are "headless" and are administered over SSH for example. You most likely know what a browser is. Now take away the GUI, and you have what’s called a

I have heard this concept used frequently, but I don't have a really good grasp of what it is. Converting an object in memory into a format that can be written to disk, or sent over the wire, etc. Wikipedia's description . I beg to differ, Wikipedia is pretty clear on this. In computer science, marshalling (similar to serialization) is the process of transforming the memory representation of an object to a data format suitable for storage or transmission. It is typically used when data must be moved between different parts of a computer program or from one program to another. http://en