Ease-of-Use SDKs Are Just Toys

Posted by Phillip Jackson in , , , on 22 September 2010

Was reading up on mobile development now that the Samsung Galaxy Tab is poised to compete with the iPad and the trend of mobile business application development is gaining steam and breadth at the world's largest companies to give visibility into the company to executives on the move as well as technical information to onsite supervisors.

This article struck me as a sobering voice opposing this regression back to the dark ages of MS Access style hobbyist development.


By Richard Adhikari


For the TL;DR's here is the important bit:
Ease-of-Use SDKs Are Just Toys

It's almost axiomatic in the high-tech industry that SMBs lack the expertise and in-house tech staff to do much in the way of IT work, so app development isn't easy for them. However, Apple and Google have unveiled SDKs are claimed to simplify the process.

For instance, Google's App Inventor claims to make the task on Android easier.However, it doesn't do away with the need for programming skills.

"Fundamentally, App Inventor doesn't appear to be that much different from Visual Basic," Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, told TechNewsWorld. "I consider Visual Basic programming with Tinker Toys." App Inventor is "a way to get non-programmers interested in development," Abrams said.

When such non-programmers run into the limitations that drag-and-drop programming entails, some may be inspired to learn more and become more savvy. In other words, unless the programmer is sufficiently skilled, apps created with simplified SDKs may not be robust enough to meet SMBs' business requirements. And if the programmers are that skilled, SMBs may not be able to afford them.


I find a great deal of truth in the above statement. The industry doesn't need tools so easy to use that Aaron the Professional Accountant can write business applications for his needs; the industry doesn't need tools so easy to use that Adam the Amateur Coder can try to figure out how to glue some things together that might work; we need tools so easy to use that Dave the Professional Developer can write quality business applications for Aaron more quickly.

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