CROSS-PLATFORM GUI'S : DEFINITIONS



PLATFORM: computer type, such as mainframe, sunsparc station, Macintosh or a PC.
Platform can also refer to different operating systems.
For example DOS and OS/2 are considered different platforms.


CROSS-PLATFORM: applications or files that can be used on different types of computers.
For instance HTML is a good example of a cross-platform standard for documents.


GUI: a user interface that utilizes windows and graphical widgets (buttons, icons, menus(pull-down, pop-up) etc.) to represent commands.


PIGUI:


API: Application Programming Interface. Its what the programmer sees when using a software development toolkit; normally this would include a set of function calls and/or objects.


CORE CODE: includes the basic operations common across all platforms.

EDGE CODE: those parts of a program that deal with platform-specific issues.