I tried to gather here terms that may need to be defined. If you think of other terms to put here, contact me.
API : Application Programing Interface ; a set of classes that work together to achieve a set of services.
a.u. : astronomical unit ; around 150 000 000 km.
cartesian coordinates : sometimes called rectangular variables
A&A : Astronomy and astrophysics.
BDL : Bureau Des Longitudes ; a French institute which produces planetary theories.
BDL's book : refers to the "Introduction au calcul d'éphémérides", written by various persons of the BDL.
JPL : Jet Propulsion Laboratory ; an American organism which produces the most precise ephemeris ; they mainly use numerical integration methods.
GPL : General Public licence ; licence protecting free software. JEphem is released under this licence.
Informatique : Frenglish term ; in French, "Informatique" means "related to computers" and "computer science";
JVM : Java Virtual Machine ; a java program is not directly executed by the machine. It is first transformed to "bytecode", which is interpreted by the JVM.
mas : milli arc second.
Parsing, to parse : parsing a file means analyzing it, and get structured information from it.
rad : abbreviation for radian
SGBD : Système de Gestion de Bases de Données - Mode de gestion des données, avec des tables, accessible via SQL ; utilisé à peu près partout. En anglais : DBMS.
Trail : a part of the site - an ordered set of pages located in a single directory. I found this way to organize a site in Sun's java tutorial site.
UML : Unified Modeling Language ;
XML
Implementation : realization. A notion is implemented when the program implementing it is coded, debugged and tested.
JEphem Glossary
.