Neven MacEwan wrote on Friday, 18 November 2005 11:35 a.m.: > 1/ Why 'reinvent' the remote procotol and not use RDP or ICA, > If you want to grab market share the easist way is to make it as > painless to migrate, also you could use any of the many thinclients > avail, I realise that 'NX' clients will appear in time but rapid > growth is the inverse of time
RDP and ICA are proprietary protocols. RDP has been implemented in an open source product (rdesktop), however to my knowledge nobody outside of Citrix/MS has access to the specifications of ICA, and I would doubt that Citrix would be interested in making the specifications available. Citrix also has a number of patents on various elements of their system which they would likely also be unwilling to licence to any developer of a potentially competing solution. So you are left with the possibility of reverse-engineering the ICA protocol - which would no doubt require significant effort, and why would you put in that effort when a usable solution is already available? To my mind, Citrix's strengths are mainly in the things it wraps around ICA such as its management tools, session reconnection, etc. Alternatives to these can be provided (and indeed some are already available) without having to implement ICA itself. You speak of reinvention, however you must be aware that the X protocol upon which NX is based has been around far longer (in the Unix environment) than either RDP or ICA. > 2/ The server is still linux, and just as the loss of 16bit will cause > howls on Windows, porting to apps linux is much worse, The savoiur may > be JRE/Mono Or some part of Wine. If the application you want to share works well enough in Wine then it should work just fine being served via NX. Bear in mind that what I was originally discussing was an *easy* way for developers to make their existing applications run on Linux. I guess if you can move your Delphi/VCL app to Delphi/VCL.net, and a VCL.net could be made to run with Mono or DotGNU (I don't know whether or not this is possible yet) then that would be a solution. BTW last I checked (about 2 or 3 months ago) DotGNU actually appeared to be much further ahead than Mono in terms of Windows Forms compatibility. What worries me most about Mono/DotGNU though is the volume of patents that Microsoft is amassing, which they may in future choose to enforce against developers or even users of Mono/DotGNU. The most immediate solution to the problem of course is to keep your Terminal Server / Citrix servers around, migrate desktops (clients) to Linux and run the Windows applications you need to run that way until you are able complete the migration at a later date. Cheers, Paul --------------------------------------------------------- Paul Eggleton Ph: +64-9-4154790 Software Developer Fax: +64-9-4154791 CJN Technologies Ltd. DDI: +64-9-4154795 http://www.cjntech.co.nz Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------- [Disclaimer: any opinions expressed in this message are my own and not those of my employer] _______________________________________________ Offtopic mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/offtopic
