Should we retire the term "Context"?
- by MrGumbe
I'm not sure if there is a more abused term in the world of programming than "Context." A word that has a very clear meaning in the English language has somehow morphed into a hot mess in software development, where the definition where the connotation can be completely different based on what library you happen to be developing in. Tomcat uses the word context to mean the configuration of a web application. Java applets, on the other hand, use an AppletContext to define attributes of the browser and HTML tag that launched it, but the BeanContext is defined as a container. ASP.NET uses the HttpContext object as a grab bag of state - containing information about the current request / response, session, user, server, and application objects. Context Oriented Programming defines the term as "Any information which is computationally accessible may form part of the context upon which behavioral variations depend," which I translate as "anything in the world." The innards of the Windows OS uses the CONTEXT structure to define properties about the hardware environment. The .NET installation classes, however, use the InstallContext property to represent the command line arguments entered to the installation class.
The above doesn't even touch how all of us non-framework developers have used the term. I've seen plenty of developers fall into the subconscious trap of "I can't think of anything else to call this class, so I'll name it 'WidgetContext.'" Do you all agree that before naming our class a "Context," we may want to first consider some more descriptive terms? "Environment", "Configuraton", and "ExecutionState" come readily to mind.
