-- Posted by Elvish15601 at 12:37 pm on April 17, 2004 What are the different API's? -- Posted by BBallAsh23 at 1:28 pm on April 17, 2004 whats an API? automatic program intro? lol... i find this useful... so i will have an idea has to what i will learn next school year! -- Posted by Elvish15601 at 2:43 pm on April 17, 2004 Application Programming Interface -- Posted by vitamin at 7:24 pm on April 17, 2004 woudldnt know m88ty dont do programming! -- Posted by sakurag at 2:24 pm on April 18, 2004 I know that Win32 is an API.  There is a DOS API, and I believe that Swing and AWT are Java API's.  In fact, most anything can be an API.  But those are probably the most widely used.   Here's an instance of your own API.   Say you have a GUI built on Win32 or Windows Forms(C#/VB), and then you had a SQL server in the background to throw out some infor when you needed it.  Well, let's say you were a smart programmer, who didn't write stored procedures on the SQL server, and didn't embed SQL calls inside your GUI. :p  But instead you decided to create an interface between the two distinctly different realms. GUI <--->  ?  <---> SQL DB What goes in that '?' Well, that's where your own API comes in.  You write an interface class(object) to sit between them.  For instance, if it dealt with customers, your GUI would call.. maybe Query.GetCustomer( ). This Query class would abstract EVERYTHING DB related away from the GUI.  The GUI would have no clue that it's talking to a Database.  Which is nice.. because what if it's not.. Let's think about that.  So now we have to think.. Is Query itself an true concrete class?  No, why should it be.  It should be an Interface, or Abstract class.  Now we can build a whole bunch of classes that can extend Query.  DBQuery, SQLDBQuery, FlatFileQuery, ODBQuery, etc.  They would all inherit from Query, so your GUI wouldn't know the difference.  Now let me redraw the picture.. GUI <---> Query <---> ? Now the ? is in a great place.  That means the GUI has no clue whats in the ?. You can put ANYTHING there.  As long as you write an appropriate Query class for it.   So now I've built a Query API for my application.  It's just an interface, so you MUST implement the methods in each inherited class.  But this is very very powerful. I talk to much. -- Posted by squirellplayingtag at 3:50 pm on April 18, 2004 I surprisingly understand that. I want to know how! Hehe. All in good time Dave, all in good time. -- Posted by sakurag at 6:02 pm on April 18, 2004 Go for it.  3 weeks ago I didn't know a bit of C# or how to do ANYTHING with it.  Now I'm developing too applications in it.  One is a Ski Rental application and the other is an image processing application.  Two totally different things, and I'm doing it from scratch.  It's great fun, and if I can learn it, you can too.  I'm not the smartest cookie out there ;} -- Posted by Elvish15601 at 12:15 pm on April 19, 2004 Quote: from sakurag at 5:24 pm on April 18, 2004 I know that Win32 is an API.  There is a DOS API, and I believe that Swing and AWT are Java API's.  In fact, most anything can be an API.  But those are probably the most widely used.   Here's an instance of your own API.   Say you have a GUI built on Win32 or Windows Forms(C#/VB), and then you had a SQL server in the background to throw out some infor when you needed it.  Well, let's say you were a smart programmer, who didn't write stored procedures on the SQL server, and didn't embed SQL calls inside your GUI. :p  But instead you decided to create an interface between the two distinctly different realms. GUI <--->  ?  <---> SQL DB What goes in that '?' Well, that's where your own API comes in.  You write an interface class(object) to sit between them.  For instance, if it dealt with customers, your GUI would call.. maybe Query.GetCustomer( ). This Query class would abstract EVERYTHING DB related away from the GUI.  The GUI would have no clue that it's talking to a Database.  Which is nice.. because what if it's not.. Let's think about that.  So now we have to think.. Is Query itself an true concrete class?  No, why should it be.  It should be an Interface, or Abstract class.  Now we can build a whole bunch of classes that can extend Query.  DBQuery, SQLDBQuery, FlatFileQuery, ODBQuery, etc.  They would all inherit from Query, so your GUI wouldn't know the difference.  Now let me redraw the picture.. GUI <---> Query <---> ? Now the ? is in a great place.  That means the GUI has no clue whats in the ?. You can put ANYTHING there.  As long as you write an appropriate Query class for it.   So now I've built a Query API for my application.  It's just an interface, so you MUST implement the methods in each inherited class.  But this is very very powerful. I talk to much. Wow that was concise and it makes me want to get a book even more but im still poor lol.  Thanks for the info -- Posted by J4m1e at 10:07 am on April 21, 2004 Almost everything uses an API, you can't list them all, it would take forever, you can use API's to control your mouse without touching it, eg, to click on something when you're not there. Almost every application has its own API. -- Posted by cowsarenotevil at 9:51 pm on April 21, 2004 Hmm, this probably came from a PM convo. he was having with me.  He's actually looking for graphics API's.  Some of them are: OpenGL Direct3D SDL Allegro Win32 GDI I personally use OpenGL, but there's no best choice. -- Posted by sakurag at 1:10 am on April 22, 2004 I'm not a big graphics person.  Though, I can't really say that, given I have done some semi-intensive graphics work.  Not with any real api, unless you consider GDI+ using only the Image and Bitmap objects taking advantage of a graphics API. We are required to do pixel level manipulation for contrasts, affine transformations, etc.  Right now I'm struggling with simple fixed axis rotation :{ Something is wrong with my matricies. :{  Tomorrow I"ll have to fix that, then I have to impliment linear and bilinear interpolation into the mix.. sigh. -- Posted by Elvish15601 at 3:41 pm on April 22, 2004 well by graphics i mainly just mean something other than command line interface