I agree with Laurel.  How many of us are working on a 5 year old legacy app
and now the user wants to change the database from say, Sybase to Oracle.
Ok so nobody raised their hand.  There is rarely ROI in a port of an
existing system from one database to another.

Yes, if you're building a product you may need to support multiple platforms
(app servers, databases, O/S) so portability is a concern, but most people
are actually building tomorrow's legacy applications.

By all means partition the logic so in the event you need to port from one
platform to another you don't have to touch every line of code.  That's good
design.   But don't lose sleep over database portability.

Cheers

-----Original Message-----
From: Laurel Neustadter
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 8/29/01 9:51 AM
Subject: Importance of Portability (was RE: Primary Key Generation - chapt
er posted on TheServerSide.com)

I agree that portability is important to a component vendor.

But how important is it to those who are developing business
applications that won't be re-sold? I think in many cases, portability
is a "nice-to-have", rather than a "must-have". The must-haves are the
features and capabilities that provide direct business value. If you are
not a component vendor, portability doesn't typically provide direct
business value. It is, of course, desirable to isolate the non-portable
areas of the application design/implementation as much as possible.

Question: Are app servers analagous to DBMSs, in the sense that
companies just don't change vendors very often? Or are folks out there
at companies that are switching app servers frequently?

Don't get me wrong ... I'm all for portability. I'm just not convinced
it is typically a "must-have".

Laurel

-----Original Message-----
From: Floyd Marinescu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 10:44 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Primary Key Generation - chapter posted on
TheServerSide.com


<stuff omitted ... >

    In regards to your comment on improving the Spec, I can see people
immediatly claiming that not implementing your own PK generation
algorithm is bad idea from a portability perspective. If you rely on the
algorithm provided by your app. server, then it is possible that the
same algorithm may not be available on other app. servers.  This is
definitly not something that a component vendor (if there are any out
there) would want to do.

<stuff omitted ...>

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