It used to be LAN, WAN, SAN, COM, DOM, ROM, TCP, UDP, FTP, CPM, IBM, JVM, then URL, XML, UML, … But it looks like the era of the TLAs is over. After all, there are only 17,576 possible combinations of three English letters, and this is definitely not enough.

So, welcome to FLAP. There used to be a couple of lone warriors like LISP and ISDN, then we’ve got HTML, SOAP, OLAP, MSDN, FQDN, ASDN (well, I made this one up, but then found out it actually does mean something), and now it’s a deluge. Everything I look at is a FLAP. WSDL, BPEL, BPMN, WSCI, …

Well, hopefully ~446K combinations ought to be enough for everybody 🙂