Determining What Makes a Good API

From APIDesign

In this chapter, it becomes clear that you understand the term API to mean something much broader than most people do: in this book, an API is any kind of interface between software components (or even, I suppose, hardware components) including, say, a network protocol. This is potentially problematic because to most people an API is, well, an API, namely a set of functions or methods available in a library or class. So it's good that you're being so explicit about this. Although your use of this term is broad, I'm actually not sure if there's any better term than "API" to use throughout the book. You could say "interface", meaning a software interface, but that would probably be confusing because the book is Java-oriented and of course an interface in Java has another specific meaning. So maybe it's just best to continue to use this term in the way you do, unless other reviewers have any better ideas about this.

--AdamDingle 00:09, 28 March 2008 (UTC)