You can read about more about the PDK on the last post on the old MakeMusic forum:
http://forum.makemusic.com/default.aspx?f=11&m=487815
Here is a bit more:
- MM doesn't give out the PDK anymore, because they expect much more to do for their support team. Not because the developer needs help (they could simply give out the PDK without giving further support as Motet suggested above). No, they expect that the plugins are so badly written that they cause the Finale documents to be corrupted which leads to more support contacts.
- We have been discussing this decision on Jari's JW Lua mailing list and didn't find a single thing where a JW Lua plugin could mess up a Finale document. Unfortunately Jari didn't contribute anything to that discussion - maybe he knows a way to "kill" a Finale document with JW lua, but at least we didn't find one. And after more than 3 years of development with JW Lua I have never encountered such a situation with more than 100 scores and JW Lua scripts that touch nearly every part of the document that is accessible through Jari's PDK.
- On the contrary: a plugin like the Perfect Layout plugin solves more than 100 Finale issues or adds long requested features. So even if 10 customers had minor problems with it, many, many more other issues would not need support anymore.
- And yes, the PDK is badly documented and probably in a bad state (although I don't know the latest release) and I think it's not worth the effort to start a new big plugin project with that PDK.
- But: that's why Jari developed his Finale Framework. It's excellent! The only drawback: you need the original Finale PDK to compile his framework, but apart from that: you don't need to look into it. So bad documentation or bad state doesn't matter anymore, because the developer only needs to deal with Jari's framework which is pretty good documented, especially in combination with the JW Lua mailing list.
- The reason why I (and others) would need the original PDK is very simple: Jari announced a few months ago that he could upload his framework or even make it open-source (an older release from 2012 is already available on his
site).
We (the JW Lua developers) could then contribute to his framework, make it more stable and add new features. Many have been requested in the last two years through his JW Lua mailing list. The original Finale PDK would only be running in the background and would more or less not need to be touched.
And Jari's C++ Finale Famework is also compatible with the JW Lua interface. So it would even be possible to transform a plugin like the Perfect Layout from Lua to C++ which would improve the processing speed drastically.
The dilemma is: Jari doesn't make the Framework open-source, because no one has the Finale PDK and can't compile his Framework without it. And MakeMusic doesn't give out the PDK, because they think it's too risky or useless.
I have had several conversations in the last 18 months with Michael Johnson (head of development) and Mark Adler - but: no way. I have even suggested that they release a "pre-compiled" Finale PDK, so that it's not possible to work with its source code, but that we could use it for Jari's Framework ... and still no way.
In other words a combination of the original PDK and Jari's excellent Finale Framework would solve most of MakeMusic's plugin problems and also my problems with releasing the plugins with an unfinished JW Lua interface.
And finally I don't think that it's difficult to transform Jari's Framework to 64bit. If you look at how fast Robert and Tobias updated their many plugins, it simply can't be. I guess it's one or two days work. But that should be it. Depends a bit on how good it was documented.