# Terminology

Learning to use a new technology and its architecture can be complicated by
the jargon used to describe components. We provide this terminology guide
to help smooth the learning the components.

## Terms

- Application - The main application object that hold the application shell,
command registry, and keymap registry.  It is provided to all plugins in their
activate method.
- Plugin - An object that provides a service and or extends the application.
- Phosphor - The JavaScript library that provides the foundation of JupyterLab, enabling desktop-like applications in the browser.
- Standalone example - An example in the `examples/` directory that demonstrates the usage of one or more components of JupyterLab.
- TypeScript - A statically typed language that compiles to JavaScript.