The ABI
For many, the ABI is a slightly confusing concept. The ABI is essentially a JSON object containing a detailed description (using a special data-encoding scheme) of the functions and their arguments, which describes how to call them in the bytecode.
Based on the ABI, the web3.js will convert all calls into low-level calls over RPC that the EVM can understand. In other words, web3.js needs to know some information (in a predefined format) about the functions and variables, in order to generate instructions that can be interpreted by an Ethereum node (EVM), and to get you the result back in a human-readable way. The EVM doesn't know about function names or variables, it processes only the data as a sequence of bytes accordingly to predefined ...
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