Document viewer SDK
Definition
A library you embed in your own application so it can display documents, as distinct from a hosted service you upload documents to. The SDK runs inside your process; the service runs inside somebody else's.
The distinction matters more than the naming suggests. With an SDK, the document never leaves the boundary you already control — your servers open it, your servers render it, your servers deliver the result. With a hosted viewer, displaying a document means transmitting it, and every question about retention, residency and access control has to be renegotiated with a third party.
The trade-off runs the other way on operations. A hosted service absorbs scaling, patching and format coverage on your behalf. An SDK puts rendering load on infrastructure you provision, and puts the upgrade cycle on your calendar.
Teams usually end up choosing on the basis of what their documents are. Marketing collateral tolerates a hosted viewer. Medical records, sealed bids and litigation material generally do not.
In Doconut
Doconut is an SDK, not a service. There is no hosted mode and no upload endpoint — the product is a set of DLLs you reference from a .NET application, and it renders documents whether or not the server has any route to the internet.
Related terms
Server-side document rendering
Converting a document into page images on the server, so the browser displays rendered pages rather than parsing the original file itself.
Air-gapped deployment
Running software in an environment with no network route to the internet, so every dependency it needs must already be inside the boundary.
Opaque session token
An identifier that carries no meaning to whoever holds it — it references server-side state rather than describing it, so a client cannot read it, modify it, or guess a neighbouring value.