Technology glossary
The terms you meet in quotations and technical meetings, defined in plain language. Each definition is written to be read on its own, and each term points to the service it belongs to.
24 terms
Web and applications
- Server-side renderingSSR
- Server-side rendering means sending a web page with its content already in place, rather than assembling it in the visitor’s browser after load. It matters because search engines and many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so anything absent from the first response is invisible to them entirely. → Web Development
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to judge page experience: how quickly the largest visible element appears, how much the layout shifts while loading, and how fast the page responds to interaction. They are taken from real visits rather than lab tests, and influence ranking when results are otherwise close. → Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Cumulative Layout ShiftCLS
- Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much page elements jump while loading. It happens when less space is reserved than the content occupies, so what you are reading slides away or a button moves under your finger. The acceptable limit is 0.1, and the fix is reserving the correct space in advance. → Web Development
- Incremental Static RegenerationISR
- Incremental Static Regeneration stores a page ready to serve for speed, then regenerates it automatically after a set interval. It combines the speed of a static page with edits appearing without rebuilding the entire site for every change. → Web Development
- Right-to-left supportRTL
- Right-to-left support means building the interface in Arabic from the start rather than mirroring an English design. Numbers, charts, arrows and dates each follow rules that differ from simply reversing direction, so an automatically mirrored layout looks correct and reads badly. → UI/UX Design
- Progressive Web AppPWA
- A Progressive Web App is a website that behaves like an app: installable to the home screen, partly functional offline, and able to send notifications. It suits anyone wanting an app-like experience without the cost of two native apps and store review, and does not replace them where deep device access is required. → Mobile Apps
- Application Programming InterfaceAPI
- An API is how one program requests data or a service from another under agreed rules. Having one turns connecting two systems from a project each time into a matter of days, and lets partners build on your systems without direct access to your database. → API Development
AI and data
- Large Language ModelLLM
- A large language model is a machine learning system trained on vast amounts of text, able to understand, generate, summarise and translate. It powers assistants, automated replies and document analysis, and its accuracy depends more on the quality of the context it is given than on its size. → AI Solutions Development
- Fine-tuning
- Fine-tuning is training an existing model on your own data so it masters a specific task, dialect or domain. It earns its cost when a task repeats heavily and ordinary prompting cannot control it, and not when better context would do — which is cheaper and faster. → AI Solutions Development
- Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG
- Retrieval-augmented generation is an approach where the system searches your documents first and answers from what it found. The answer rests on your actual data rather than what the model memorised, and the source can be cited — which is what reduces invented answers. → AI Solutions Development
Infrastructure and operations
- Zero-downtime deployment
- Zero-downtime deployment updates a system without the service stopping for visitors. The new version is built separately and traffic moves to it only after it succeeds and passes a health check, with immediate rollback if that check fails — instead of editing inside the copy serving visitors. → DevOps & CI/CD
- Continuous Integration and DeliveryCI/CD
- CI/CD is an automated pipeline that tests every code change and ships it if it passes. Errors surface as they are written rather than weeks later, and deployment becomes a repeatable, reversible operation instead of a manual event the team dreads. → DevOps & CI/CD
- Recovery Time and Recovery Point ObjectivesRTO / RPO
- Recovery time objective is how long a service may acceptably take to return after a failure; recovery point objective is the maximum amount of work it is acceptable to lose. The two numbers determine backup design and its cost, and a backup whose restore time has never once been measured means nothing. → Cloud Services
- Autoscaling
- Autoscaling raises server resources when load rises and lowers them afterwards without manual intervention. It must be configured with a clear upper bound, because scaling without a ceiling lets a code error or a modest attack generate a bill exceeding the month’s budget. → Secure Cloud Solutions
Security and data protection
- Personal Data Protection LawPDPL
- The Personal Data Protection Law is the Saudi law governing how personal data is collected, processed, retained, disclosed and destroyed. It grants data subjects rights to be informed, to access, to correct, to have data destroyed and to withdraw consent, and obliges organisations to define retention periods and incident notification procedures. → Cybersecurity & InfoSec
- Least privilege
- Least privilege means granting each person or system only the minimum access needed for their task. Its effect is that compromising one account does not open the whole company, and the most common breaches of it are shared administrator accounts and the accounts of people who have left. → Cybersecurity & InfoSec
Business systems and compliance
- ZATCA e-invoicing
- E-invoicing is issuing invoices in a digital format approved by the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority, with a QR code and integration with the Authority’s platform at the phase applying to the business. It is mandatory in Saudi Arabia, and a system that cannot issue compliant invoices creates an accounting problem it does not solve. → Accounting & E-Invoicing
- Enterprise Resource PlanningERP
- Enterprise resource planning is one system running inventory, purchasing, sales, accounting and staff from a single source of data. Its purpose is knowing one correct number about your company at any moment, instead of reconciling files whose figures disagree. → ERP Systems
- Customer Relationship ManagementCRM
- A CRM stores everything that has happened with each customer: who spoke to them, when, what was said, and what happens next. Its real alternative is not another system but an employee’s memory and a spreadsheet, and both leave the company when their owner does. → CRM Systems
Marketing and visibility
- Answer Engine OptimisationAEO
- Answer engine optimisation is preparing content to be quoted inside an AI-generated answer rather than only listed in results. It requires a direct answer in the first paragraph, question-shaped headings, structured data, and content readable from the server, because many crawlers do not run JavaScript. → Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Generative Engine OptimisationGEO
- Generative engine optimisation is the work of getting your brand named inside answers produced by AI systems. It depends on clear entities, verifiable figures and facts, and presence in sources the engine already cites, far more than on keyword density. → Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Structured data
- Structured data is hidden markup that tells a machine what a page’s contents mean: this is a company, this is a price, this is a question and its answer. Written as JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary, it is what enables rich results and lets answer engines cite your content with confidence. → Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, TrustE-E-A-T
- A framework Google’s quality raters use to judge content: does the author have first-hand experience, subject expertise, is the site a recognised authority, and can the information be trusted. In practice it means identified authors, verifiable company details, and stated sources. → Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Return on Ad SpendROAS
- Return on ad spend is the revenue produced for each riyal spent on advertising, calculated by dividing revenue by spend. It means nothing when conversion tracking is misconfigured — the most common fault in the advertising accounts we review. → Paid Ads Management