decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
An API is a Communication Protocol | 270 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
An API is a Communication Protocol
Authored by: calris74 on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 07:15 PM EDT
First, an API is the set of rules about what to pass and how to pass it between the Application Program and the (functional) item(s) in the Library that the Application Program wants to use;
That is the Specificiation
then it's the protocol for what is passed back and how it is passed back from the (functional) item(s)in the Library to the Application Program.
Again, this is part of the Specificiation - But this part may be pre-determined by the underlying architecture. For example the 'how' is slightly different under Linux than it is under Windows.

And this is where Java's 'Write Once, Run Anywhere' comes to the fore. The creators of Java saw that even though C and C++ were standard languages you still had to compile the program for each architecture (because the ABI for each is different).

Also, C and C++ define standard ways of getting text input from and output to the user (and to some extend files), but what about drawing an image on the screen. You have different APIs in Windows, Linux and Mac for doing that. So a program that draws images on a screen written for Windows CANNOT be compiled for Linux or OSX without modifying it.

So Java defines a larger set of standard APIs than C and C++ (but not as big as Linux, Windows of OSX) which include graphics and sound (and much more). And because Java is interpreted (rather than the users compiled program being run directly on the CPU) much of the ABI issues no longer exist

NOTEI think the Dalvik ABI is different from the standard Java ABI. So a program compiled by a Java compiler cannot run on a Dalvik VM (and visa-versa)
The actual act of passing information back and forth is an *application* of the API.
Technically, it's called invocation (you invoke an interface) but application (as a verb) is close enough

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )