Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Before Using a SDK...

...What types of questions should you try to answer? Here's a short list of evaluators that I've used in the past:
  • How easy is it to find a tutorial? It always makes me feel better when I can produce something with the SDK without having to waste an entire day.
  • When was the last release made? Although it's a generalization, SDK's that have current releases seem to have better support.
  • If the project is open source, how big is the community? If it's not open source, how easy is it to get technical support?
  • Is the SDK developed natively for your target platform? In the age of VM based languages, this questions seems somewhat dated. However, from a maintenance perspective it is easier to integrate an SDK that closely matches the syntactic style for the rest of your project. Additionally, if the language is a translation, you may need to develop wrappers in order to maintain a coherent workflow.
Are there other questions you ask yourself before you download and code?

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