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What's behind Carnegie Mellon's cool new Java acronyms

Java tools employ human-centered design methods

By Alpha Doggs on Wed, 06/17/09 - 1:03pm.
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Every so often an acroynm comes along that just can't do the words behind it justice. Take Carnegie Mellon's new mineral-inspired acro Jadeite, one of two new tools designed to make Java programming easier (the other is dubbed Apatite). The gist of the tools is that they help developers more easily pinpoint APIs from the thousands of options at their disposal.

"This is a fundamental problem for all programmers, whether they are novices, professionals or the growing number of end users who just need to modify a Web page," said Brad Myers, professor of human-computer interaction at CMU, in a statement. "It's possible to design APIs so that they are easier to use, but still leaves thousands of existing APIs that are hard to use but essential for Java programming. Jadeite and Apatite help programmers find what they need among those existing APIs."

Anyway, behind the acronym Jadeite we have Java Documentation with Extra Information Tacked-on for Emphasis. No, not an exact letter-for-word match, and wouldn't have guessed it in a million years.

Apatite, meanwhile, stands for Associative Perusal of APIs That Identifies Targets Easily. Yeah, that one needed an acro.

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Thanks for your comments. Hope our systems prove useful. We have lots of other similar acronyms! See:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/acronyms.html.

P.S. Your page doesn't seem to display in IE 7 on Vista.

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The future of networking as seen through the works of university and other labs.

Our mission is to give you a peek into the future of networking by tracking "alpha" research at university and other labs and at companies based on this work. Your Alpha Doggs editor is Bob Brown, Network World Online Executive Editor, News.