API
Application Program Interface by which an application program accesses operating system.An API can also provide an interface between a high level language and lower level utilities and services which were written without consideration for the calling conventions supported by compiled languages. Netscape Corporation and Microsoft both provide APIs called NSAPI and ISAPI that essentially extend their web servers, and it provides developers a way to put application code actually within the web server. This means that you donât have to start up a separate process each time one of these applications is called. And, since that application is always running, it can maintain connections to the database.
See: Application Program Interface
A set of calling conventions which define how a service is invoked through a software package. [Source: RFC1208]
An interface between the operating system and application programs that specifies how the two communicate with each other.
(
Application Programming Interface) Interfaces that extend the capabilities of
Web servers ; used by programmers to write applications that can interact with other applications. A server API is a published interface that lets software developers write programs that become part of the Web server itself. Usually these are DLLs (Windows dynamic load libraries) that are loaded into memory and stay resident at all times. Some common server APIs and the servers they support:
ISAPI - Microsoft Internet Information Server
NSAPI - Netscape Commerce and Enterprise Server
WSAPI - O'Reilly Web Site and Web Site Pro
