Template talk:Toolkit

I've created this template for use with things like Gtk+, GLUT and Qt, under the assumption that "toolkit" refers to a library which aids in graphical user interface development. It's been my experience that that's the case, but I want to check myself; Does the term "toolkit" reasonably and/or commonly apply to support libraries outside of GUI development? While it's been my experience that those libraries adopt the term SDK, again, I want to check myself. --Michael Mol 04:28, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Toolkits are particular kinds of libraries that focus on turning the low-level interactions with a GUI drawing system into higher level concepts (widgets/components). The earliest toolkit I know of is Xt/Xaw (Xt provided the glue – plus a bunch of stuff to make things like an object system in plain C – and Xaw defined widgets on top of it; Xaw was superseded by Motif, thank goodness…) but there may be earlier ones; my knowledge of the state of GUI system development prior to the late '80s is very shaky. –Donal Fellows 17:14, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I agree about the meaning of 'toolkit', but I, for one, would prefer that we not use this term; I just find it unaesthetic and gratuitously confusing.

Also, a SDK is something entirely different: a SDK has these two key attributes: 1. It is that which you need to write software which interacts with something else in particular -- some hardware, some host application, some platform, whatever (e.g. "iPhone SDK", "Java ME SDK", "Source SDK", etc etc) — and it is not just a library but also one or more of an IDE (or plugin for an IDE), documentation, header files if applicable, test suites, compilers (especially cross-compilers, for mobile devices, microcontrollers, etc), other toolchain components, etc. An SDK is a big glob of stuff useful to developers, almost none of which goes into your program; it's the stuff you need to write/compile/build the program. —Kevin Reid 00:13, 4 February 2010 (UTC)