Gathering of the Responses to Developer's Kit

[Xiang Li <xli -at- FEDERALAPD -dot- COM>]

Hi, All Fellow Tech Communicators:

Two weeks ago, I sent email to this list seeking information on developing
software developer's kit. I am grateful that I have some very useful
responses. Some people sent me email requesting those response. I think it
is a good idea to put together those responses and send to this list.

The following is the summary:

No. 1

A developer's kit is usually a manual that describes things that developers
need to know in order to develop software for a given product, or in a
given
environment.

You need to find out who your target audience is (what kind of developers
they are, what they need to develop, etc). Also, have a look at other
Developer's kits that your company has already produced. If this is the
first Developer's Kit your company has produced, try to find a Developer's
Kit for a product that someone at your company uses. It'll give you a much
clearer idea about what needs to go into it, and how you might organize it.
Good Luck.

Penny Staples
pstaples -at- airwire -dot- com

No. 2

 have done SDKs (software developer's kits) a few times.

In a nutshell, some quick advice:

1.  Ask your developer audience which SDK they have used in
the past that they have liked the most.  Ask enough of them until
you start to get repetition in their answers.  Then you will know you
have found the right one(s).

2.  Pattern your SDK after the one that they like.

3.  Also try to spend time with a developer that is using the SDK, if it
exists now.  This way you will find out what they really need.  Another
way to find out is to ask the people who work tech support with the
developers.  Another way is to ask the developers, though this is not
usually satisfactory because the developers' minds don't run in this
direction and most of them cannot adopt this point of view very easily
unless you limit your question to, "What information do you need to know
in order to produce your product?"  Then be sure to provide that
information
in your SDK.

In general, there is no set bag of standard information to go into your SDK
because all software is different.  That's why you have got to find out
what
it is that your developers need and provide that.  Be sure to differentiate
between the kind of information that the API authors give you and the kind
that
your SDK audience needs.  These will be radically different in most cases
because
of their disparate points of view.

Susan

No. 3

Look at the documentation for another developer's kit and go from
there. The Java Developer's Kit is free from Sun and you can download
both it and the documentation (www.javasoft.com). If that's not a
close enough match, then find something that is and buy it and look at
the structure of that doc. If it's too expensive, look for a used copy
on the Internet or at a place like Computer Renaissance.

Good luck.
==
====================
Chris Hamilton

No. 4

I had to write a developer's kit about six months ago for one of our new
products, so I've been in your same shoes. You might look at the
documentation included with the Java development kit (JDK). I can't recall
their URL right now, but I remember getting some ideas from their
documentation on possible content. The developer's kit for our product is
used for developing Java-based components, so the audience needed to be
familiar with the Java programming language.

First, how are you defining "developer's kit"? Our kit was simply a set of
interfaces that allowed software engineers to develop components that could
be integrated with our product--in this case, I'll call our product XYZ and
our developer's kit XDK. Simply put, our developer's kit was XYZ's API. The
purpose of our XDK documentation was to explain how to write XYZ-compliant
components and integrate those components into our XYZ product. Here are
the topics we included in the XDK document (it turned out to be more of a
"how to" task-oriented document):

About This Document
  Purpose
  Organization
  Assumptions (all the stuff the software engineers should know)

Learning Some Basics
  What Is the XDK?
  What Does the XDK Software Contain?
     XDK Directory
     IDL Files
     Class Files
  What's Required to Use the XDK?
     Hardware
     Software
  How Do I Develop XDK-Compliant Componets?
  What Is the Integration Environment for Testing?
     Hardware
     Software
  What Else Do I Need to Know?

Installing the XDK

Writing XDK-Compliant Components
  Getting Object References
  Handling Exceptions
  Publishing and Subscribing to Events
     Organizing and Naming Events
     Publishing
     Subscribing and Unsubscribing
  Creating Devive Components
  Creating Server Components

Integrating Components Into XYZ
  Activating and Deactivating Components
  Monitoring Components
  Logging Components
  Accessing the Object Repository
  Integrating with the Graphical User Interface

Examples
  Client Example

Hope this helps...

Todd Snarr
Sr. Technical Writer
Auto-Soft Corporation
Salt Lake City, UT
todd_snarr -at- autosoft -dot- com

Again, many thanks to all of those who responded to my email.

Xiang Li


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