What is an SDK? Explain
What is SDK?
SDK is the acronym that you hear these days especially when you want to build mobile apps or build anything on the available today’s technology.
So SDK stands for a software development kit and now let’s have a look at what is this kit and what is included so basically a software development kit is a software package that you download off the internet and it contains three main things the first thing that usually is included in the SDK is some sort of development environment
we call it IDE integrated development environment and basically it’s some sort of glorified amazing code editor which allows you to write code and gives you some kind of code editing tools and some version control system and stuff that you can play with and it helps you a lot with writing code easier so at first kind of part of an SDK is an IDE and usually.
it’s a part of the mobile SDKs mobile development environments such as Android or iOS in the case of Android it’s an Android studio intern in the case of iOS it’s Xcode and for Windows Phone and Windows 10. it’s Visual Studio so the IDE is usually what you find in mobile SDKs.
The next part of the SDK is the packaging kind of libraries like the packaging tools that allows you to build the code that you write in the IDE and turn it into a binary package and usually these are called build tools and they allow you to turn your code into a package that you can all upload to
App Store or Google Play and the next thing are the set of tools that you can use to measure your apps performance and basically measure and find out about bugs and find the memory leaks and stuff like that so basically this is the three different parts of and a sdk for mobile apps but usually when we talk about SDKs sometimes we just don’t mean the mobile SDKs there are plenty of new
technologies coming out one could be a leap motion which is a development platform for a whole new interface you can look it up at leap motion just google it and they build this really amazing tool that you set up in front of your monitor and then you can basically have a kind of a three-dimensional touch interface and interact with your computer that way they have a development kit
being offered and the development kit is not just the software it also is the hardware as well so they give you a kind of a demo version a kind of an extended version of their hardware and then they give you the software you need to build for that platform so development kit is basically what you need to start building on a platform and the tools the library is the API that you need to kind of extend that platform and build the things you want with it so basically that’s it for SDK.
