[LAD] State of Plugin API's

[Patrick Shirkey]

On 11/02/2009 08:27 AM, David Robillard wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-01 at 21:36 +0100, hollunder at gmx.at wrote:
>    
>> Dave,
>> here are some observations I and probably many others made:
>>
>> 1) hosts are slow at picking up extensions<for some reason>
>>      
> Takes time, effort.
>
>    
>> 2) hosts mostly use just slv2<for some reason>
>>      
> Takes less time, less effort.
>
>    
>> 3) plugin authors are reluctant to write extensions<for some reason>
>>      
> Takes time, effort.
>
>    
>> 4) a number of plugin authors wrote their own hosts<for some reason>
>>      
> There weren't many at the time, had to be done (chicken&  egg), having
> multiple implementations (not all slv2) was considered a good thing.
> You can't claim 2 and 4 both as bad things :P
>
>    
>> So what is your variant?
>>      
> Time, effort.  Clearly. :)
>
> The rest is just excuses, really.  What is the point in sitting here and
> hypothesizing about what hypothetical problems might be deterring
> hypothetical unnamed developers?  This kind of braindead dead-end
> mailing list babble is exactly why LV2 has to be extensible in this way
> - the people who are actually about to do anything useful don't get
> bogged down by all the noise.
>    


Isn't that the only reason for being a member of this list?

I can see that the above details could be made more obvious to the 
casual developer. I will work on incorporating the details into the new 
documentation.

I'm starting to get the impression that what is really missing is not 
just documentation but a complete documentation system. The average 
developer will be coming from a proprietary world where companies have 
invested a lot of effort to make the documentation accessible and in 
addition there are several external web projects offering to fill in the 
gaps as it can be a good little revenue earner with advertising and 
google ads, etc..

I don't have much experience with the specific plugin architectures and 
the developer documentation that is provided but perhaps others can make 
suggestions of the most useful documentation features they have found 
while developing for alternate plugin systems?

However I have been working with borland, visual studio and xcode and 
found several common documentation themes in those environments that we 
are missing round here in general.








Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd