-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
DevFaqApiSpi
API is a general term - an acronym for Application Programming Interface - it means something (in Java, usually some Java classes) a piece of software exposes, which allows other software to communicate with it.
SPI stands for Service Provider Interface. It is a subset of all things that can be API specific to situations where a library is providing classes which are called by the application (or API library), and which typically change the things the application is able to do.
The classic example is JavaMail. Its API has two sides:
-
The API side — which you call if you are writing a mail client or want to read a mailbox
-
The SPI side if you are providing a wire-protocol handler to allow JavaMail to talk to a new kind of server, such as a news or IMAP server
Users of the API rarely need to see or talk to the SPI classes, and vice-versa.
In NetBeans, when you see the term SPI, it is usually talking about classes that a module can inject at runtime which allow NetBeans to do new things. For example, there is a general SPI for implementing version control systems. Different modules provide implementations of that SPI for CVS, Subversion, Mercurial and other revision control systems. However, the code that deals with files (the API side) does not need to care if there is a version control system, or what it is.
The content in this page was kindly donated by Oracle Corp. to the Apache Software Foundation.
This page was exported from http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqApiSpi , that was last modified by NetBeans user Jglick on 2010-06-11T20:10:31Z.
NOTE: This document was automatically converted to the AsciiDoc format on 2018-01-26, and needs to be reviewed.
Apache NetBeans is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects.
While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
This wiki is an experiment pending Apache NetBeans Community approval.