On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 09:07:07AM -0600, jgdavid...@mac.com wrote: > Should we dump the Windows port in favor of a clean Unix code base, > configure, build, and install?
Cross-platform portability is very Nice to Have, and I've actually used it. Fortunately I've never had to deal with or even look at the Unix vs. Windows compatibility layer, so I can't speak on its maintenance burden. It just worked. That was really nice when (unexpectedly) porting my code from Solaris to Windows. The AOLserver Windows build process back then indeed seemed pretty bad; far too much unscriptable Microsoft project file crap. But I thought someone cleaned that up later. On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 09:24:41AM -0600, jgdavid...@mac.com wrote: > For folks using Windows, I always follow up with the question: With > VMware, Parallels, etc. today, even if you're bound to Windows > hardware, can you just virtualize away the difference? Absolutely not. In my case, it's because I use AOLserver as a custom app server, which needs to build against proprietary libraries that are ONLY available on Windows. If what you need is a native Windows library, running Linux in a virtualized container is of no help whatsoever, you might as well be running on a remote Linux box. (Cygwin I'm not sure about. Can Cygwin applications build with native Windows libraries?) In my case, actually what happened is the proprietary vendor library discontinued Solaris support, leaving only Windows, so I ported to Windows. I'm still running it on Windows today. Now, if I was writing that same app today I might do things somewhat differently. But it was Really Nice that the custom AOLserver app I'd originally written on Solaris mostly Just Worked when I ported it to Windows. My own AOLserver on Windows use case is likely very atypical, but I think it's still a useful minor example of how cross-platform portability can be unexpectedly helpful, even when you originally didn't think you'd need or want it. Is cross-platform support in AOLserver worth the maintenance burden? Not having worked on that code, I can't say. But I can say that the cross-platform code does have real value, and was probably a lot of work to get right way back when, so I'd caution against throwing it out without a very clear case that doing so is worth more than the loss, and that there isn't some better way to achieve the same gains. My (completely unfounded in any hard evidence) gut-level suspicion is that 80% of the simplicity gains to be had from completely discarding Windows support are likely achievable by instead re-factoring (somehow or other) whatever parts are actually giving maintainers the most trouble. -- Andrew Piskorski <a...@piskorski.com> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;258768047;13503038;j? http://info.appdynamics.com/FreeJavaPerformanceDownload.html _______________________________________________ aolserver-talk mailing list aolserver-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aolserver-talk
