Welcome to AFC! Formerly known as Amiga Foundation classes, are now Advanced Foundation Classes since we are no longer supporting Amiga, but the Linux and Open Source community.
AFC are a suite of classes aimed to ease development of any kind of application in a variety of languages. Currently AFC supports both C and C++ programming languages. AFC should be considered like the building blocks for your applications, since they provide simple but needed services for your application development.
We cannot describe here all AFC classes, also because they are continuing to evolve and new classes are added often, but we can highlight the main features common to all AFC classes.
AFC classes API calls are as much standardized as possible. For example, if you need to add an item to a list, the call would be afc_(class_name)_add. So the NodeMaster (which is a list handler class) has the afc_nodemaster_add method, and the ArrayMaster (which is a dynamic array handler class) has the afc_array_master_add method.
AFC uses a programming approach for passing parameters called tagging. This technique, allows the developer to extend the library without changing the API. You'll see later in detail how tags work, for now, just remember that it is a very handy way to handle parameters.
As you can see by this huge manual, AFC are deeply documented. And this is a great feature you should not understimate. Too many time we have used great libs that come with few lines for the API description, or not at all. AFC are well documented. All important features are documented, all the public APIs are documented and so the source is.
AFC are constantly developed, and of course also supported. At the time of this writing, there are two different mailing list for AFC users and developers. The AFC users mailing list is aimed to help all programmers using AFC libs and having problems with them, while the AFC developer mailing list is for the active AFC developers who are contributing to the project. So, if you think just to use the AFC in your projects but do not intend to help developing AFC, then just subscribe to the afc-user mailing list in case you need help.
Here there are two URLs to subscribe to AFC lists:
afc-user mailing list
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/afc-user
afc-devel mailing list
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/afc-devel