There will be lots of buzzwords, abbreviations, and other hipster combinations of letters in this book. Please do not be afraid of them. I can tell you more but, for the most part of things you need to do using Vue.js or any other framework, you do not need to know them all by heart! But, in any case, let us leave the thesaurus here so that you become confused with terminology at any point of the book, you can come back here and have a look:
- Application state: This is a global centralized state of the application. The data in this state is initialized when the application is started. This data can be accessed by any application's component; however, it cannot be changed easily by them. Each item of the state has an attached mutation that can be dispatched on special events occurring inside the application's components.
- Bootstrap: This is a project that provides a set of styles and JavaScript tools for developing a responsive and nice application without having to think a lot about CSS.
- Content Distribution Network (CDN): This is a special server whose aim is to deliver data to the users with high availability and high performance. People and companies who develop frameworks like to distribute them via CDNs because they allow them just to point out the CDN's URL in the installation instructions. Vue.js is hosted in npmcdn ( https://npmcdn.com/ ), which is a reliable and global network for the things that are published to the npm.
- Components: These are the pieces of the application with their own data and View that can be reused through the application, acting as a brick from which the house is being built.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): This is a set of styles to apply to the HTML document to make it nice and beautiful.
- Declarative Views: These are the Views that provide a way of direct data binding between plain JavaScript data models and the representation.
- Directives: These are special HTML elements attributes in Vue.js that allow data binding in different ways.
- Document Object Model (DOM): This is a convention for representing nodes in markup languages such as HTML, XML, and XHTML. The nodes of the documents are organized into a DOM tree. When someone says interacting with DOM, it is just their fancy way of saying interacting with HTML elements.
- npm: This is a package manager for JavaScript and allows searching, installing, and managing JavaScript packages.
- Markdown: This is a human-friendly syntax that allows web writers to write their text without worrying about styles and HTML tags. Markdown files have a
.mdextension. - Model View ViewModel (MVVM): This is an architectural pattern whose central point is a ViewModel that acts as a bridge between the View and the data model, allowing the data flow between them.
- Model View Controller (MVC): This is an architectural pattern. It allows separating Views from Models and from the way that information flows from Views to Models, and vice versa.
- One-way data binding: This is the type of data binding where the changes in the data model are automatically propagated to the View layer, but not vice versa.
- Rapid prototyping: In the Web, this is a technique of easily and rapidly building the mockups of the user interface, including some basic user interaction.
- Reactivity: In the Web, this is actually the immediate propagation of any changes of data to the View layer.
- Two-way data binding: This is the type of data binding where the changes in the data model are automatically propagated to the View layer, and the changes that happen in the View layer are immediately reflected in the data model.
- User interface (UI): This is a set of visual components that allow the user to communicate with the application.
- Vuex: This is an architecture for Vue applications and allows simple management of the application state.