Ubuntu Looks To An SDK, Improved App Development

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 27 October 2012 at 09:34 PM EDT. 52 Comments
UBUNTU
Canonical and the Ubuntu development community hope to improve application development for developers targeting Ubuntu 13.04.

Another one of the popular topics for the UDS Copenhagen summit next week for Ubuntu 13.04 is the "app development" track. There's several different items to be discussed about Ubuntu app development from an Ubuntu SDK to improving the online documentation and support for those developers targeting Ubuntu support.

The big item is the creation of an Ubuntu SDK (Software Development Kit). As written on one of the session pages, "While the 13.04 cycle focus will not be on tooling for an Ubuntu SDK for app developers, we do want to kick off a discussion and ultimately define the criteria we will use to assess each one of the contending technologies and libraries we will include in a future Ubuntu SDK."

A proper Ubuntu Software Development Kit would be nice for developers targeting Ubuntu SDK with a standard set of libraries/interfaces that are stable, but this isn't likely to please non-Ubuntu Linux users. This SDK that Canonical will look to push to application developers will likely be centered just around Ubuntu's needs and not the Linux ecosystem as a whole with other Linux distributions not being a focus, which could potentially lead to greater Linux desktop fragmentation, but we'll see what gets talked about next week at UDS-R.

A new Ubuntu App Developer upload process is to be discussed.

Work on an online API documentation web-site for Ubuntu is also to be discussed in Demark. On a similar note, they also want to integrate Ask Ubuntu with the Ubuntu App Developer site. Sharing code snipps from the app developer web-site is also another item being desired as well as providing a video section to assist developers targeting Ubuntu.

A list of all talks being planned for next week for the "app development" track can be found here. Other topics to be talked about at next week's Ubuntu Developer Summit include rapid hardware enablement, Valve on Linux, Ubuntu on mobile devices / tablets, Ubuntu TV, and pushing Ubuntu as a Linux gaming platform.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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