Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: SDK or not

Author:Jakob Nielsen
Posted:8/5/1999; 12:07:25 PM
Topic:Yusuf Mehdi on Instant Messaging
Msg #:9178 (In response to 9147)
Prev/Next:9177 / 9179

I agree that an SDK is the wrong answer. Actually, it is *an* answer and would help for some projects such as building a fancy new application that used IM.

But many of this things people want to do should not require an army of programmers. Often, *no* programming is necessary. So the "S" in SDK would impose too large a burden on domain experts who are not programmers but simply want to add some functionality to their website. For example, a link that sends an Instant Message when clicked or one that makes the user get real-time updates about some event during the next ten hours.

Such features should be implementable in plain HTML or XML by anybody who can write ASCII and have it served up from a hosting service in Pittsburgh where they can't touch anything except FTP files onto the file system.

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