Scripting is a way to programmatically change the state of a component or components.
Current script engines are more then just command executors. They are full fledged programming languages. Their syntax is however kept simple, because scripting should be accessible to a broad audience.
If you load a web document in your browser, all the elements contained in your document are reflected in the scripting environment. This means that all elements (such as all html tags) that are contained in your document are mapped to objects in your scripting environment.
This is also the case for applets. In Netscape navigator 3 or greater and in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or greater you can simply invoke the public methods of an applet.
An application programming interface (API) is set of methods which comprise the behavior exposed by diputree. A script can invoke these methods on diputree.