The SDK market is hot right now. If you look at the number of new services emerging and open-source tooling out there, one can conclude that the need for SDKs is blowing up. Clearly the API landscape has exploded and the need to generate code is increasing. I can only anecdotally speak to this based upon the number of SDK vendors I have in my inbox asking to sponsor the site. While unfortunate I can’t take their money, I am happy with the existing SDK partnership with APIMATIC, who I have worked with for a decade. The one thing I will share with those producing new SDK generation tooling is that you have a long journey ahead of you, and there is more to it than you can imagine, but thankfully you can find the clues in APIMATIC’s journey to understand where you will need to go, but also where APIMATIC has already been.
- Define - OpenAPI provides a massive opportunity to generate SDK, first demonstrated by Tony Tam with Swagger and Swagger Codeine.
- Transform - Once you are on the ground selling within the enterprise you realize there are many different specs in use you need to transform.
- Fix - Wait, but before we can generate any SDKs we will need to fix the problems in the specifications to make sure we have usable SDKs.
- Generate - Ok, now we can generate, but we also need to make sure we have expertise in the nuance of generation for each programming language.
- Publish - Yes! Now we have some SDKs, but where do they need to go so that our API consumers can access across all versions being generated.
- Automate - The number of APIs are growing exponentially and so is the number of SDKs, and we have to make sure that we can automate it.
Yes, every API producer needs SDKs. Then there is everything that goes into making that happen, as well as after you make that happen. Then you gotta repeat at scale across many APIs. One thing I want to emphasize here is the amount of work APIMATIC has done at the API model and the defining, transforming, and fixing of a source of truth for each API. SDK generation requires the most complete and accurate OpenAPI possible. This is where I see the majority of SDK generation and services underestimate the complexity of what is needed here, but also API producers are often properly seeing the work here either. In the end, if you are an API producer looking to custom develop SDKs or use an open-source SDK generation, or you are a new API service provider looking to deliver an SDK generation tool—-remember, SDKs are hard. 😜
