I have just finished porting a Java program to Linux using blackdown 116. The result is excellent!
The program was originally developed under INPRISE JBuilder 2.01 on
Win NT4. (www.inprise.com).
The application (5,000 lines of code) uses mostly swing components
for the UI. I have decided to limit myself to "core" JDK classes and swing
to avoid potential porting problems.
The application make heavy use of relational database access (15 tables,
10,000 records about).
The database used here is Interbase 5. Interbase runs on several Unix
platforms, Windows and was recently ported to Linux (www.interbase.com).
I use a pure java JDBC interface to access the Interbase 5 database.
The database server can be anywhere on the network, under Linux or any
other platform (using the JDBC server interface). Each client, needs of
course the JRE, the source code in jar format and the JDBC jar file (under
300K).
This setup enables to have very light client and very easy deployment.
Clients can be Linux or of course Windows.
The round trip of porting to Linux took me about :
- A few weeks to familiarize myself to Linux itself (I have no prior Unix or Linux experience (I have so far only worked under Windows).
- Only a few hours to do the porting itself.
After testing the application for a few days, I am happy to report that I have encountered no problem. I have exactly the same results on Linux as with Windows NT4, with one major advantage: it all runs faster under Linux and is of course more stable.
Although I am certainly less technically competent than most of you, I will be happy to share my experience of developing and migrating from Windows to Linux.
Thanks again to Blackdown for your outstanding work.
Pierre LATECOERE
