An Applications Programming Interface or API specifies the particular requirements for a new piece of program code to function properly with an existing body of code, usually an operating system. Typically an API covers how to pass parameters, exchange data structures, and perhaps comply with naming conventions. (One naming convention for theSky is the programmer-style use of a lower-case initial letter and medial capital in most terms.)

The skyAPI describes coding on a three-tier virtual platform ("theSky") consisting of

• a browser with a powerful JavaScript and Java interface,
• web application middleware with unlimited server pages (in ASP, JSP, Perl, or PHP) and a huge shared file storage space for an organization,
• and at the backend one big relational database (the SAP model) with metadata about the file system.

There is no operating system as such in theSky. The skyAPI describes an abstraction layer that is separated by virtual machines from the OS and hardware of the browser, and abstracted through SQL and ODBC standard protocaols from the RDBMS at the backend. The middleware requires contact with the server pages architecture (e.g., ISAPI for Active Server Pages) which typically exposes an object model (e.g., the ASP components - Request object, Response object, Server object, etc.).

The skyAPI "commodotizes" the browser and RDBMS, requiring only minimal conformance with standards. The skyPorter conversion tool allows serverPages conforming to the API to be ported to the other middleware tools (e.g., from ASP to PHP). This allows theSky to be "agnostic" about the choice of middleware and committed to supporting most major development tools and languages for server pages.

skyBuilders serverPages demand a specific architecture that organizes the server-side code and datasets and corresponding client-side code and data. One purpose of the architecture is to standardize the Request and Response objects for reliable turn around (round-trip) of critical data that synchronizes the servers (database and middleware) with the browser in the connectionless HTTP environment.

Another purpose is to divide the code into logical sections with definite functions, to facilitate automatic code conversion using the skyPorter tool between the major server-side scripting languages - Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and VBScript.

These logical sections are:

• Server Directives
• Server Variable Declarations
• Server Subroutines and Functions
• The HTTP Request Object
• Retrieval of Form/Querystring Round-trip variables
• SQL SELECT Queries
• Application Logic
• SQL UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE Queries as needed
• Dynamic creation of builderPage objects
• Dynamic creation of HTML (with server-side variable substitution)
• HTTP Response

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Author: bobdoyle

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