Glossary

Shared vocabulary for the course. See the course index for where each concept is practiced and the debugging playbook for applying the terms during investigation.

• Accessibility: designing software that people with different abilities and assistive technologies can use.
• API: a defined interface through which software exchanges data or requests actions.
• Authentication: verifying who a user or service is.
• Authorization: deciding what an authenticated identity may do.
• BSON: the binary-encoded document representation used by MongoDB.
• Browser: a client program that interprets Web documents and exposes Web APIs.
• Build: transforming source into deployable output, such as Vite's dist/ directory.
• Cache: stored data used to avoid repeating a request or computation; cached data can be stale.
• Client: software that requests or consumes a resource or service.
• Component: a reusable UI unit with a defined responsibility.
• Cookie: a small value sent by a browser according to server-set scope and security attributes.
• CRUD: create, read, update, and delete operations.
• Dependency: a package or runtime capability another project relies on.
• Endpoint: an API method and path combination.
• Environment variable: configuration supplied outside source code, often per machine or deployment.
• ESM: the JavaScript module system using import and export.
• HTTP: the request and response protocol used by the Web.
• Idempotent: producing the same intended result when an operation is repeated; PUT is commonly designed this way.
• Middleware: code that runs in a server request pipeline.
• Persistence: data that survives process or browser termination.
• Promise: an object representing the eventual result or failure of asynchronous work.
• Render: calculating the UI representation for current data.
• Route: a server or client rule mapping a method/path or URL to behavior.
• Schema: a declared shape and validation rule set for data.
• Session: server-associated state representing a browser interaction, commonly referenced by a cookie.
• State: data whose change affects behavior or displayed output.
• Status code: the numeric HTTP result category and outcome, such as 200, 404, or 500.
• Test double: a controlled substitute for a dependency in a test.
• Threat model: an explicit analysis of assets, attackers, trust boundaries, and mitigations.
• Validation: checking whether input satisfies required shape and rules.
• Web origin: the scheme, host, and port tuple used for same-origin and cookie decisions.