September 2007
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
9h 7m
English
Many software vendors build in APIs to facilitate the ability of third-party software to manage or otherwise interact with their applications. This can increase the user and installation base of an application because it provides a degree of flexibility, plugability, and scriptability that is otherwise unattainable. An example from the world of commercial security products is the OPSEC API from Check Point, which allows third-party applications to manage Check Point firewalls from remote systems (see http://www.opsec.com). Given that commercial products sometimes open APIs to allow other applications to easily integrate, it follows that open source projects would adhere to this practice to ...