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I'm a bit confused with the "kit" thing. I'm a .Net guy moving toward linux and iPhone dev. I'm wondering if Kits are simply something like a dll you reference? or is it when you have a complete framework consisting of many parts?

can I call NUnit "TestKit"?

+1  A: 

What "kits" are you referring to?

Things like WebKit (open source web page rendering engine spearheaded by Apple), UIKit (User Interface framework for iPhone development), and TuneKit (framework for building iTunes LP content) are all marketing terms used by Apple for various collections of technologies and tools.

Brian
yeah those kind of kits.So, it's an apple thing and not a linux naming convention?
Ali Shafai
@Ali: Apple has essentially nothing to do with Linux. Are you referring only to Apple-branded tools?
Michael Petrotta
@Michael: it seems that I am. as I said before, I'm confused. so, it's just an Apple marketing thing to call them kits?
Ali Shafai
@Ali: I've never seen it used in the same way in other contexts, so it would appear so, yes.
Michael Petrotta
@Michael In unix-land we call the set of scripts and tools to crack/take over a machine's root account a rootkit. I believe this predates Apple's kit-ness. Post-Apple, there is also MochiKit (a javascript library) and Starkit (a stand-alone wrapper technology for Tcl).
slebetman
@Ali Michael is right, it's got nothing to do with Linux so I've removed the tag from the question.
Brian
@Michael sorry, Starkit also predates Apple's use of the "kit" suffix.
slebetman
MochiKit was written by someone very familiar with Apple's APIs and has the Apple meaning. Bob Ippolito did a lot of work on PyObjC.
Ken
+1  A: 

from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kit "A set of related parts, tools, clothing or other equipment, collected for some specific purpose."

  • A set of development tools or libraries can be called a kit. An SDK is a kit.
  • WebKit is a content engine, so it's not really a kit.

NUnit is a test framework, not a kit. If you ship it together with a Mocking framework you can call those together a kit. A software bundle is often also called a stack. They call LAMP a stack, not a kit.

Eddy Pronk
+1  A: 

Kit has no set meaning in Cocoa, it's kind of a suffix for frameworks that Apple likes to use. It has a bit of a connotation of being a compact, elegant, high level way to build whatever it lets you build. Occasionally it's used to distinguish a UI portion of a framework from a non-UI portion, which might have a framework starting in Core. Core is similarly mostly meaningless, but with hints of being more low level or non-UI. On the desktop Core at one point meant "shared between Cocoa and Carbon".

There is a TestKit framework! To me, the intended connotations of calling your framework "TestKit" are as above. You intend this to be a compact, elegant way to do testing. You will not throw the kitchen sink at the problem, you will endeavor to find a way to solve all the problems people want solved in a minimal way.

Ken
Oh, one thing: Kits are pretty much exclusively written in Objective-C. No C framework would have Kit in the name.
Ken