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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Saflink Corp. (ESAF) Biometric Software Provider -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: srs who wrote (2479)	12/6/1997 9:45:00 AM
From: Jaffo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4676

srs and DLevitt: My software guru buddy offered the following opinion: "API generally refers to "Application Program Interface". They are increasingly prevalent in software these days, and are intended to allow different software interfaces use a common tool - in this case, biometrics. For example, a company having a specific system can interface with another company with a different system using the same biometric (NRI's) application. This makes it easy for companies with different systems to "talk", in this case, verify or validate a user. By the year 2000 or so, API will be a household name in engineering circles (and even outside of engineering). Suffice it to say, it will make it much easier for any company to verify someone's finger-image from a PC, no matter what type of system the company has, so long as it has NRI's S/W". DLevitt and the software experts out there...We are anxiously waiting for your take/analysis on the new API product. Thanks in advance for responding. Jaffo

To: srs who wrote (2479)	12/6/1997 4:22:00 PM
From: John Fairbanks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4676

An API is a published set of routines that can be used to interface with another piece of software. Any piece of software has internal APIs, but when a company decides to publish the API and open their software up for general use it usually means that: 1) The API can't be changed at the whim of the company anymore because people outside the company are relying on it remaining consistent between versions, and 2) it needs to be a bit cleaner and standardized than it would normally be... You could compare it to a guest room in a house... in any piece of software there are rooms and closets you don't want the public to see because they are a mess and it would be embarrassing. This is primarily due to turnover in the people working on the software, tight schedules that keep developers from cleaning up after themselves, etc. But when the public is going to see it you take the time to make it look pretty and make it so it makes sense as well! ;-) Now what DLevitt was saying was that from the article is sounds like NRID believes that they have come up with an API that they hope will be something of an industry standard. Usually that kind of development is done by a consortium of companies, or by someone who is a clear enough market leader that others have to follow their lead or die. At the very least what this API will allow developers like me to do is to write my own applications that will use fingerprint authentication as long as NRID's software is installed. In this day and age, and since this is on NT, I would suspect that this is being done through a COM interface. Anyway, the good news is that this opens things up for other companies to start developing software that relies on NRID's scanner and underlying drivers. Whether or not anyone will chose to do so remains to be seen, but I suspect they wouldn't have taken the time to write it if someone hadn't requested it. -John