Re: Developer's Kit

[Todd Snarr <todd_snarr -at- AUTOSOFT -dot- COM>]

Xiang Li writes:

>I am going to write a developer's kit for a software program for the
>company I am working for, I have not done anything like this before,
>anybody out there did this before? or anybody has the suggestions about
>what should be in the kit, and the structure of this kit, or any other
>advice?

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


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