Discussion - What are APIs?

The application areas and solutions, whether object-oriented or not, covered a wide range of interests and did not suggest a canonical approach to the definition and development of APIs. In particular, as has been mentioned before, the somewhat blurry demarcation between computation models, languages and APIs seem to confuse all of us. Moreover, a catalogue of APIs seemed to be beyond our reach.

An attempt to overcome the confusion by restricting ourselves to discussing the requirements for the (future) Java class libraries failed, surprisingly, because the majority felt that the restriction to a particular (!) language was not appropriate.

So the workshop was in danger of being halted, with a number of questions unanswered. What actions should we take in terms of recommendations to the W3C? What perspectives can we (meaningfully) distinguish? And, what (exactly) are our areas of interest? For example, although many of the solutions proposed were object-oriented in spirit, only few were so in the flesh.