# Glossary of Terms

Continuous Integration : DEFINE ME

Internal Service : An internal service is a program that
provides data to other programs and is restricted from
public access e.g. Fedora, Solr, Redis.

Module : A module is shared application code packaged as a
library. We will be creating a number of modules that will
be released publicly. We may also create private modules.
Since the bulk of our work is in Ruby and ruby modules are
called gems we may use “gem” and “module” interchangeably.

Production : Production should be as stable, reliable, and
robust as possible.

Pre-Production : The pre-production environment software
should be _precisely_ the same as production. The only time
when software versions should differ from production is
while testing a new configuration before immediate
deployment to production. Data in pre-production may lag
behind and/or diverge from production data. As such, the
pre-production environment is _not_ a fail-over mirror of
the production environment.

Sandboxed : A sandboxed environment doesn’t rely on any
external services to run. It has it’s own copy of the
application data.

Staging : The staging environment is a sandboxed, publicly
accessible application environment used for prototyping new
features and experimenting with new software. The goal of
this environment is to be able to demonstrate software under
active development to stakeholders as quickly as possible.

Web Application : A web application is a program which
dynamically generates web pages for public use. It may also
provide information in other formats than HTML e.g. JSON,
XML.

Web Service : A web service is a program which provides data
to external programs, but not web pages. It may serve some
HTML but it’s primary purpose is to serve as a data API
rather than provide curated a user experience.