API in the context of Subroutine

Pixar (/ˈpɪksɑːr/), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of the Disney Entertainment segment of the Walt Disney Company.

Pixar started in 1979 as part of the Lucasfilm computer division. It was known as the Graphics Group before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Disney announced its acquisition of Pixar in January 2006, and completed it in May 2006. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by RenderMan, the company's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan Interface Specification image-rendering API. The studio's mascot is Luxo Jr., a desk lamp from the studio's 1986 short film of the same name.

watchOS is the operating system of the Apple Watch, developed by Apple. It is based on iOS, the operating system used by the iPhone, and has many similar features. It was released on April 24, 2015, along with the Apple Watch, the only device that runs watchOS. watchOS exposes an API called WatchKit for developer use.

The second version, watchOS 2, included support for native third-party apps and other improvements, and was released on September 21, 2015. The third version, watchOS 3, was released on September 13, 2016, to emphasize better performance and include new watch faces and stock apps. The fourth version, watchOS 4, was released on September 19, 2017. The fifth version, watchOS 5, was released on September 17, 2018, to add more third-party support and new workouts, along with the "Walkie-Talkie" feature. The sixth version, watchOS 6, was released on September 19, 2019. The seventh version, watchOS 7, was released on September 16, 2020, to support handwashing and sleep tracking. The eighth version, watchOS 8, was released on September 20, 2021, with updates in health monitoring, visuals, and apps. The ninth version, watchOS 9, was released on September 12, 2022. The tenth version, watchOS 10, was released on September 18, 2023. The 11th version, watchOS 11, was released on September 16, 2024. The 12th and current version, watchOS 26, was released on September 15, 2025.

Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced /ˌɛsˌkjuˈɛl/ S-Q-L; or alternatively as /ˈsiːkwəl/ "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data, i.e., data incorporating relations among entities and variables.

Introduced in the 1970s, SQL offered two main advantages over older read–write APIs such as ISAM or VSAM. Firstly, it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command. Secondly, it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, i.e., with or without an index.

In computer programming, a comment is text embedded in source code that a translator (compiler or interpreter) ignores. Generally, a comment is an annotation intended to make the code easier for a programmer to understand – often explaining an aspect that is not readily apparent in the program (non-comment) code. For this article, comment refers to the same concept in a programming language, markup language, configuration file and any similar context. Some development tools, other than a source code translator, do parse comments to provide capabilities such as API document generation, static analysis, and version control integration. The syntax of comments varies by programming language yet there are repeating patterns in the syntax among languages as well as similar aspects related to comment content.

The flexibility supported by comments allows for a wide degree of content style variability. To promote uniformity, style conventions are commonly part of a programming style guide. But, best practices are disputed and contradictory.

Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. These characters are characterized by being designed to be connected horizontally and/or vertically with adjacent characters, which requires proper alignment. Box-drawing characters therefore typically only work well with monospaced fonts.

In graphical user interfaces, these characters are much less useful as it is simpler to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs. However, they are still useful for command-line interfaces and plaintext comments within source code.

NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California, which specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later developed the first dynamic web page software. It was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer co-founder who had been removed from Apple that year. NeXT debuted with the NeXT Computer in 1988, and released the NeXTcube and smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The series had relatively limited sales, with only about 50,000 total units shipped. Nevertheless, the object-oriented programming and graphical user interface were highly influential trendsetters of computer innovation.

NeXT partnered with Sun Microsystems to create a programming environment called OpenStep, which decoupled the NeXTSTEP operating system's application layer to host it on third-party operating systems. In 1993, NeXT withdrew from the hardware industry to concentrate on marketing OPENSTEP for Mach, its own OpenStep implementation for several other computer vendors. NeXT developed WebObjects, one of the first enterprise web frameworks, and although its market appeal was limited by its high price of US$50,000 (equivalent to $103,000 in 2024), it is a prominent early example of dynamic web pages rather than static content.

The computer graphics pipeline, also known as the rendering pipeline, or graphics pipeline, is a framework within computer graphics that outlines the necessary procedures for transforming a three-dimensional (3D) scene into a two-dimensional (2D) representation on a screen. Once a 3D model is generated, the graphics pipeline converts the model into a visually perceivable format on the computer display. Due to the dependence on specific software, hardware configurations, and desired display attributes, a universally applicable graphics pipeline does not exist. Nevertheless, graphics application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Direct3D, OpenGL and Vulkan were developed to standardize common procedures and oversee the graphics pipeline of a given hardware accelerator. These APIs provide an abstraction layer over the underlying hardware, relieving programmers from the need to write code explicitly targeting various graphics hardware accelerators like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and others.

The model of the graphics pipeline is usually used in real-time rendering. Often, most of the pipeline steps are implemented in hardware, which allows for special optimizations. The term "pipeline" is used in a similar sense for the pipeline in processors: the individual steps of the pipeline run in parallel as long as any given step has what it needs.

Lexico was a dictionary website that provided a collection of English and Spanish dictionaries produced by Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishing house of the University of Oxford. While the dictionary content on Lexico came from OUP, this website was operated by Dictionary.com, whose eponymous website hosts dictionaries by other publishers such as Random House. The website was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com on 26 August 2022.

Before the Lexico site was launched, the Oxford Dictionary of English and New Oxford American Dictionary were hosted by OUP's own website Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), later known as Oxford Living Dictionaries. The dictionaries' definitions have also appeared in Google definition search and the Dictionary application on macOS, among others, licensed through the Oxford Dictionaries API.

Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of December 2025, Google Translate supports 249 languages and language varieties at various levels. It served over 200 million people daily in May 2013, and over 500 million total users as of April 2016, with more than 100 billion words translated daily.

Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it originally used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translated text to English and then pivoted to the target language in most of the language combinations it posited in its grid, with a few exceptions including Catalan–Spanish. During a translation, it looked for patterns in millions of documents to help decide which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language. In recent years, it has used a deep learning model to power its translations. Its accuracy, which has been criticized on several occasions, has been measured to vary greatly across languages. In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – which translated "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar".

Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is an emerging technology discipline that helps organizations aggregate, correlate, and analyze threat data from multiple sources in real time to support defensive actions. TIPs have evolved to address the growing amount of data generated by a variety of internal and external resources (such as system logs and threat intelligence feeds) and help security teams identify the threats that are relevant to their organization. By importing threat data from multiple sources and formats, correlating that data, and then exporting it into an organization’s existing security systems or ticketing systems, a TIP automates proactive threat management and mitigation. A true TIP differs from typical enterprise security products in that it is a system that can be programmed by outside developers, in particular, users of the platform. TIPs can also use APIs to gather data to generate configuration analysis, Whois information, reverse IP lookup, website content analysis, name servers, and SSL certificates.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis.

Clients often use this in combination with autoscaling (a process that allows a client to use more computing in times of high application usage, and then scale down to reduce costs when there is less traffic). These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems.

An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. For a typical web application, the application server sits behind the web servers.

An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a software developer through an application programming interface. An application server may have features such as clustering, fail-over, and load-balancing. The goal is for developers to focus on the business logic.

An online video platform (OVP) enables users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the Internet, often via a private server structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally upload video content via the hosting service's website, mobile or desktop application, or other interfaces (API), and typically provide embedded codes or links that allow others to view the video content.

The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language for the unified shader model of Direct3D 10 and higher. It was developed alongside the Cg (short for C for Graphics) shading language from Nvidia. Early versions of the two languages were considered identical, only marketed differently.

Although Cg and HLSL share the same core syntax, some features of C were modified and new data types were added to make Cg/HLSL more suitable for programming graphics processing units.