OpenGL APIs require two things to work. They need a place to manage the state of the OpenGL like a working memory. This is the rendering context. Then they also need a surface to draw on. The buffers are attached to the surface. Example buffers are color buffer, stencil buffer, and depth buffer.
Setting up and managing these two aspects is the realm of the underlying OS. In OpenGL ES there is a standard called EGL that deals with these integration APIs
satya - Mon Aug 27 2012 16:54:29 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Here is the home page for EGL:http://www.khronos.org/egl
satya - Mon Aug 27 2012 16:55:26 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
The way khronos defines EGL
EGL? is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs. EGL also provides interop capability between Khronos to enable efficient transfer of data between APIs ? for example between a video subsystem running OpenMAX AL and a GPU running OpenGL ES.
satya - Mon Aug 27 2012 16:56:56 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
EGL provides
Mechanisms for creating rendering surfaces (windows, pbuffers, pixmaps) onto which client APIs can draw and share
Methods to create and manage graphics contexts for client APIs
Ways to synchronize drawing by client APIs as well as native platform rendering APIs.