The Buzzword Firing Squad

If buzzword proliferation was a punishable crime, the penitentiaries would be full of software developers and blog authors.

Below is my list of buzzwords, catch-phrases, and technologies that need to be summarily executed without a lengthy trial:

  • Web 2.0 (do I even need a reason?)
  • AJAX (ahem.. The idea of asynchronous HTTP requests for XML content is core to XForms and better architected in that context)
  • SOA / Web Services (90% of the time people use this term they refer to SOAP-based remote procedure invokation specifically)
  • RDF/XML Syntax (This one has done more damage to RDF advocacy than any other)
  • Semantic (This term is so thoroughly abused that it would be par for the course to read of cron job referred to as a 'semantic' process.)
  • "Yes, that's very nice and all, but does it scale?" !*&%#@@$!!!
  • Ontology: I've found it easiest to think of an Ontology as a Taxonomy (or polyhierarchy) with a minimal number of logical constraints. Without logical constraints, there is nothing 'ontological' about a model that could easily be represented in an E-R diagram.

I'm certain this is only about 2% of the full list, I'll be sure to add to it as more come to mind.

[Uche Ogbuji]

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1 response
My personal response to the "Does it scale?" scorn-question is to enquire sweetly, "And will <interlocutor's preferred alternative> scale to hundreds of millions of hits per second from the entire Internet while maintaining seven-nines uptime [3 seconds per year]?  No?  Then let's talk about what the realistic use cases are, then, please."