The relationship between an application program, the operating system and the hardware is usually shown in the form of a stack of layers as shown below:
1. Application
2. Application Programming Interface (API)
3. Operating System
4. Device Driver
5. Hardware
Most applications depends on the operating system - which is why the operating system will provide a set of programming libraries knows as APIs or SDKs (Software Development Kits) for programmers to use when writing applications.
The APIs is connection between the operating system and the running application. The running application depends on the API to perform essential tasks on the system by getting the operating system what they require. That the main reason behind for a program that is written by using Windows Vista APIs will not run on an Apple Mac without some kind of emulation or help.
As there are many different pieces of hardware, it would be not possible for an operating system to support them all, that’s the main reason hardware will write device drivers for different operating systems, so the operating system knows how to respond to the hardware.
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