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An application programming interface is a form of interface for a software system, in that it describes how to access the functions and services provided by a system via an interface. If a system producer wants others to be able to use the system, an ICD and interface specs (or their equivalent) is a worthwhile investment.
In object-oriented programming, an interface or protocol type [a] is a data type that acts as an abstraction of a class. It describes a set of method signatures , the implementations of which may be provided by multiple classes that are otherwise not necessarily related to each other. [ 1 ]
The use of interfaces to allow disparate teams to collaborate raises the question of how interface changes happen in interface-based programming. The problem is that if an interface is changed, e.g. by adding a new method, old code written to implement the interface will no longer compile – and in the case of dynamically loaded or linked plugins, will either fail to load or link, or crash at ...
A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, [3] network adapter, LAN adapter and physical network interface [4]) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. [5] Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus.
An interface is thus a type definition; anywhere an object can be exchanged (for example, in a function or method call) the type of the object to be exchanged can be defined in terms of one of its implemented interfaces or base-classes rather than specifying the specific class. This approach means that any class that implements that interface ...
The interface to a software library is one type of API. The API describes and prescribes the "expected behavior" (a specification) while the library is an "actual implementation" of this set of rules. A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in the form of different libraries that share the same programming ...
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Like other interface description languages, IDL defined interfaces in a language- and machine- independent way, allowing the specification of interfaces between components written in different languages, and possibly executing on different machines using remote procedure calls.