After being in this industry for a while, it's always fun when new hires and college recruits come in with varying degrees of experience. Some are well-versed in the SDK world, while others are dead-set on using notepad and doing everything from scratch. This gave us the idea to come up with 10 reasons to use an imaging SDK, or even just an SDK in general. So here they are in a semi-particular order, because many of them build off of or hinge upon the first two:

1. Save time. Many features found in imaging SDKs such as OCR, Barcode, Forms, DICOM, PACS, etc. would take years to develop on your own. Using an SDK can shorten your development life cycle to less than a month.
2. Save money. In the business world, most of us don't have the luxury of waiting years to develop a product. The time saved by using an SDK can easily recoup the development costs since you can start selling your product much earlier.
3. Two heads are better than one. SDKs let you borrow from another developer's expertise so you can focus on yours.
4. Nothing new under the sun. No sign of disrespect, but your project or something similar to it has probably been done before. A well-respected SDK with a wide user-base has valuable insight and experience that could help you with more than just calling its functions.
5. Dependable libraries have already gone through the wringer. This is especially true for established commercial libraries and oftentimes less for open-source. When an SDK is that company's line of business, you can trust that they have tested it and ensured its quality across a wide variety of platforms, images, and scenarios.
6. Expand your customer base. SDKs can give you a greater confidence in bidding on more diverse projects, tapping in to additional revenue sources.
7. Easy cure for feature creep. Usually looked upon as a negative in the development process, feature creep can be handled with grace and ease with the right SDK. Impress your bosses and clients with how fast you can go with the flow and expand your project's scope.
8. Easy to find help. The more popular an SDK is, the easier it will be to find help using it. This can be directly through that SDK's customer service, 3rd party forums, blogs, or even bringing in contract work for your project.
9. Compliance. Ever looked through the specifications for a file format? How about DICOM? Beyond the baseline complications of decoding and encoding information correctly, vertical markets such as health care and government require a high level of security and compliance that an SDK will help navigate and keep your product in line with.
10. Fun! This may be more subjective and personality-dependent, but I think the vast majority of us find great satisfaction in trying new things and creating a variety of projects. Rather than working on one thing for an extended time, using SDK can open up the door to completing many different projects over the course of your programming career.

If we've somehow convinced you in this post, or if you were already attune to the benefits of using an imaging SDK, you can take a deeper look and learn why you should choose LEADTOOLS as your imaging SDK provider.

Today, we published a new video that highlights some of the LEADTOOLS OCR SDK features that set it apart from the competition. Thousands of developers rely on the LEADTOOLS OCR SDK to create enterprise-level OCR, forms processing, MICR, and OMR solutions. Watch the LEADTOOLS OCR SDK features video to see why.

We hope you enjoy the video. If there are any specific LEADTOOLS features you want to see highlighted on our YouTube channel, please let us know!

Last week we touched briefly on the new Java libraries in our post about the latest Document Imaging features for Linux in LEADTOOLS. Today we'll take a closer look at what the LEADTOOLS April update has for Java programmers as a whole, because it extends far beyond just Linux and document imaging.

The recent LEADTOOLS Version 19 update added far-reaching Java support for both Windows and Linux operating systems. These new, highly-requested imaging libraries for Java include functionality for nearly all markets and imaging technologies that LEADTOOLS is known for:

At first glance, medical imaging technology and web may appear to be incompatible technologies because of non-standard medical-image bit depths and the huge amount of data associated with even just one DICOM dataset. However, as demonstrated with this last release, the engineers at LEAD Technologies continue to develop frameworks, technologies and algorithms that provide HTML5 developers tools to work with medical images over the wire, while still ensuring great UX for their users.

With input from numerous customer requests, structured display, templates and custom layouts have been added to the HTML5 Medical Viewer. With these features, the end-user can design custom display templates choosing from three ways to arrange series images: sequentially, DICOM instance number or custom alternative with JavaScript. Users can save the templates to a LEADTOOLS storage server as a DICOM structured display dataset; the LEADTOOLS Medical Viewer will use this to render series.

There are many reasons why Linux administrators are die-hard fans, and Linux will remain a viable option to host services for many years to come. Recognizing the many benefits of Linux, LEAD Technologies has released a major update to its LEADTOOLS for Linux offering, which is available in its LEADTOOLS Document and Medical product families. With these features now available, Linux developers and administrators can leverage LEAD Technologies’ years of experience to build and host modular, enterprise document services on secure and stable Linux servers.

The LEADTOOLS Document Viewer services can now be hosted on Linux as Java services. The LEADTOOLS Document Viewer includes rich document-viewing features such as text search, annotation, memory-efficient paging, inertial scrolling and vector display of files such as PDF, SVG, DOCX and DWG/DXF in HTML5 applications.