Language abuse bites back

In the early days of Tomcat, they settled on an architecture wherein tomcat is fronted by an HTTPD proxy, which would also serve the application’s static data.  That makes sense, not least from a performance point of view.

But it gives rise to a by-product.  Tomcat folks come to use the word static to refer to anything served by httpd and not tomcat, regardless of whether it is in fact static or dynamic.  A minor irritation, but not one on which I’ve hitherto felt the need to rant.

Today that little abomination bit back, when Jean-Frederic Clere used it in his talk on proxying/clustering/loadbalancing solutions for tomcat.  An audience member took the word at face value and questioned him on a usage that just didn’t make sense.  Oops!

(no disrespect to Jean-Frederic – a much-respected developer, and since English isn’t his native language, he has no strong reason to feel the abuse).