Glossary
API (Application Programming Interface): A set of protocols and tools that allow different software applications to communicate with each other.
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): A cloud-based identity and access management service provided by Microsoft that helps employees sign in and access resources.
Azure App Service: A fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications and APIs.
Azure Document Intelligence: A cloud-based service that uses machine learning to extract structured information from documents such as PDFs and images.
Azure Open AI: A suite of AI services and tools provided by Microsoft that includes advanced language models developed by OpenAI.
Celery: An asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing, used to handle background processing tasks.
Component: A modular, interchangeable part of a system that encapsulates a specific piece of functionality.
Container: A lightweight, standalone, and executable software package that includes everything needed to run a piece of software, including the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings.
C4 Model: A framework for visualizing the architecture of software systems, using a hierarchical approach that includes Context, Container, Component, and Code diagrams.
Data Access Layer: The layer in an application architecture responsible for accessing and managing data, typically through a database.
Data Encryption: The process of converting data into a code to prevent unauthorized access, ensuring data privacy and security.
FastAPI: A modern, fast (high-performance) web framework for building APIs with Python, based on standard Python type hints.
Frontend: The part of a web application that users interact with directly, typically including the user interface and client-side logic.
JWT (JSON Web Token): A compact, URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties. Used for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object.
Latency: The time delay between a user's action and the response from the system.
Microservice: A software architecture style that structures an application as a collection of small, loosely coupled services, each implementing a specific business capability.
Nuxt.js: A high-level framework built on top of Vue.js that simplifies the development of server-side rendered applications.
ORM (Object-Relational Mapping): A programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems (such as between a database and an object-oriented language).
Redis: An in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker.
Scalability: The capability of a system to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to accommodate growth.
Self-Hosted: Hosting a software application on your own servers or infrastructure rather than using a cloud provider.
SQLAlchemy: A SQL toolkit and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) library for Python, which provides a full suite of well-known enterprise-level persistence patterns.
Supabase: An open-source alternative to Firebase, providing a suite of tools for building and scaling applications, including a PostgreSQL database, authentication, real-time subscriptions, and storage.
Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs directly in your markup.
Virtual Machine (VM): An emulation of a computer system that provides the functionality of a physical computer, running an operating system and applications.
Web Framework: A software framework designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs.