Glossary

Developer Glossary

Definitions and explanations for common developer terms, concepts, and acronyms.

A

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

A symmetric block cipher chosen by the U.S. government to protect classified information. It is implemented in software and hardware throughout the world.

B

Base64

A binary-to-text encoding scheme that represents binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation.

H

Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC)

A specific type of message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function and a secret cryptographic key.

HTML Entities

A piece of text that begins with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon, used to display reserved characters or invisible characters in HTML.

J

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

A lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate.

JSON Web Token (JWT)

A compact, URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties. Often used for authentication and authorization.

R

Regular Expression (Regex)

A sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Used by string-searching algorithms for 'find' or 'find and replace' operations.

S

Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit (SHA-256)

A cryptographic hash function that generates a fixed, unique 256-bit (32-byte) signature for a text or data file.

U

Universally Unique Identifier (UUID)

A 128-bit label used for information in computer systems to guarantee uniqueness across space and time without a central coordinator.

URL Encoding (Percent-encoding)

A mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) using a percent sign followed by two hexadecimal digits.