An important item discussed in Copenhagen this Monday, regarding app development, was the emergence of an Ubuntu SDK at some point in the not too distant future.

An Ubuntu-specific software development kit, bringing together all the necessary software and tools for app development, ought to excite people looking to make or bring their applications to Ubuntu.

While this won’t likely be seen during this development cycle, such a set of stable and standardized API libraries and developer tools can be expected to be released in future. As written on one of the UDS 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.”

..the 13.04 cycle focus will not be on tooling for an Ubuntu SDK…

Among the things discussed were how the SDK would integrate with Ubuntu: its language and toolkit support, consistency across all the form-factors, availability of documentation, the sandboxing of in-development applications and its general stability, maturity, support-life & performance.

A selected set of APIs, a root file-system or “file-system container”, development tools (such as an IDE, compilers, etc.), plus a back-end ecosystem and documentation, were all proposed for inclusion in an Ubuntu SDK. It was also debated whether the SDK should be released as applying to specific Ubuntu releases or not.

For Canonical an SDK to push towards application developers will certainly benefit Ubuntu; having an SDK would encourage more developers to use and make apps for Ubuntu, and also make Ubuntu more marketable as a software development platform.

Chances are more about the SDK and the app development process will be revealed as UDS progresses.