I’ve come across the terms "RNA" and "RNA property" in programming documentation before. Can someone explain to me what these terms mean?
Are these general programming terms that apply to many languages, or are these non-general terms? It’s difficult to avoid getting search results related to biology for this, and the programming vocab sites I’ve been to don’t have them. All I see anywhere are acronyms and no place to figure out exactly what they are because everyone who’s anyone apparently already knows…
Here are some examples:
Panel properties Properties were discussed in section Properties, but
we did not explain how to display custom properties in a panel. This
script does exactly that. An RNA property is displayed with the syntaxlayout.prop(ob, ‘myRnaInt’)
DNA and RNA are terms used by the Blender devs and community to refer to their system of serializing Blender state data, which is as old as Blender itself. Each .blend file includes a DNA structure, which details pretty much everything about the blend and about the version and exact copy of Blender last used to work on it. This makes Blender files highly backward-compatible, as they allow any future version of Blender to configure itself the same way an older version would have been to work with older files, and to digest the files in an extremely normalized way that can be extended version-to-version without changing the file structure.
RNA is a newer concept; think of it as a DTO for DNA. It allows pieces and sub-trees of DNA to be passed around within Blender and between Blender and its plugins (the primary language for these being Python), and is the primary way that this is done.
A short primer: http://www.blendernation.com/2008/12/01/blender-dna-rna-and-backward-compatibility/