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SDKs do have their value. I honestly think if the SDK is designed correctly and is open source, a lot of these points are mute. On top of that, the SDK can ha

SDKs do have their value. I honestly think if the SDK is designed correctly and is open source, a lot of these points are mute. On top of that, the SDK can handle some interesting dev tasks that everyone has to deal with regarding a REST API. For example, best practices with api keys / secrets, error handling, caching, etc... SDKs like any piece of software needs to be evaluated before integration, if it is an SDK that doesn't meet your requirements for development, you build your own against the REST API.

brandur 13y ago
> SDKs do have their value. I agree! And a well designed API can certainly help workaround many of these problems. I would say that fully evaluating an SDK is a non-trivial undertaking though, especially when it comes to features like connection persistence. And then what if it turns out that the SDK doesn't support everything you want (which is often the case)? On the flip side - if a service has a good API, I can build my own wrapper which uses my own conventions very quickly. And that leads to what the main point of the article was meant to be: please design a good API so that I can opt out of your SDK if I want to. BTW, I think you were looking for "moot".