In the legal issues section, we learned that programmers wishing to obtain an open source license must use "the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program" (opensource.org). This statement is braud. Not all open source users are familiar with computer languages, and even the best programmers do not know every computer language. To solve this delima within the open source definition, programmers created open source languages. These languages are fully defined and accessable to anyone who wants to learn them. Debate exist, however, over how open these languages really are. You can read Martin Heller's article to learn more about the debate. Despite the debate, most open source software is written in one of the following languages: Pearl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Java, and JavaScript. For our purposes, we will focus on JavaScript.
Some GIS companies release Application Program Interface (API) code. The API allows the programmer access to the company's free geographic information, and it allows the programmer to use the information in a web browser using simple JavaScript. The activity for this module will teach you how to manipulate an API embeded in a webpage.
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