Interface (computing)

In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. The exchange can be between software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans, and combinations of these. Some computer hardware devices, such as a touchscreen, can both send and receive data through the interface, while others such as a mouse or microphone may only provide an interface to send data to a given system. In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. The exchange can be between software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans, and combinations of these. Some computer hardware devices, such as a touchscreen, can both send and receive data through the interface, while others such as a mouse or microphone may only provide an interface to send data to a given system. Hardware interfaces exist in many of the components, such as the various buses, storage devices, other I/O devices, etc. A hardware interface is described by the mechanical, electrical and logical signals at the interface and the protocol for sequencing them (sometimes called signaling). A standard interface, such as SCSI, decouples the design and introduction of computing hardware, such as I/O devices, from the design and introduction of other components of a computing system, thereby allowing users and manufacturers great flexibility in the implementation of computing systems. Hardware interfaces can be parallel with several electrical connections carrying parts of the data simultaneously, or serial where data are sent one bit at a time. A software interface may refer to a wide range of different types of interface at different 'levels': an operating system may interface with pieces of hardware. Applications or programs running on the operating system may need to interact via data streams, filters, and pipelines; and in object oriented programs, objects within an application may need to interact via methods. A key principle of design is to prohibit access to all resources by default, allowing access only through well-defined entry points, i.e., interfaces. Software interfaces provide access to computer resources (such as memory, CPU, storage, etc.) of the underlying computer system; direct access (i.e., not through well-designed interfaces) to such resources by software can have major ramifications—sometimes disastrous ones—for functionality and stability. Interfaces between software components can provide constants, data types, types of procedures, exception specifications, and method signatures. Sometimes, public variables are also defined as part of an interface. The interface of a software module A is deliberately defined separately from the implementation of that module. The latter contains the actual code of the procedures and methods described in the interface, as well as other 'private' variables, procedures, etc. Another software module B, for example the client to A, that interacts with A is forced to do so only through the published interface. One practical advantage of this arrangement is that replacing the implementation of A by another implementation of the same interface should not cause B to fail—how A internally meets the requirements of the interface is not relevant to B, which is only concerned with the specifications of the interface. (See also Liskov substitution principle.) In some object-oriented languages, especially those without full multiple inheritance, the term interface is used to define an abstract type that contains no data but defines behaviours as method signatures. A class having code and data for all the methods corresponding to that interface and declaring so is said to implement that interface. Furthermore, even in single-inheritance-languages, one can implement multiple interfaces, and hence can be of different types at the same time. An interface is thus a type definition; anywhere an object can be exchanged (for example, in a function or method call) the type of the object to be exchanged can be defined in terms of one of its implemented interfaces or base-classes rather than specifying the specific class. This approach means that any class that implements that interface can be used. For example, a dummy implementation may be used to allow development to progress before the final implementation is available. In another case, a fake or mock implementation may be substituted during testing. Such stub implementations are replaced by real code later in the development process. Usually a method defined in an interface contains no code and thus cannot itself be called; it must be implemented by non-abstract code to be run when it is invoked. An interface called 'Stack' might define two methods: push() and pop(). It can be implemented in different ways, for example, FastStack and GenericStack—the first being fast, working with a data structure of fixed size, and the second using a data structure that can be resized, but at the cost of somewhat lower speed.