... and why it might make sense to migrate a legacy DOS system to it or use it in lieu of a Windows or X-based environment.
After successfully redeploying a curses/python based inventory tracking program (a client program accessing a database server) for our organization (in only 2 weeks plus versus 1 month for the Delphi version), reviewing old copies of Byte (back when Windows/386 was just introduced) and looking at the state of the art then (third party implementations of DOS that allowed multitasking), and thinking about my experiences with development environments under DOS vs. Windows, I was struck by how much needless complexity has been forced upon users and application developers by the transition to a pure GUI environment. There are many situations when a GUI and the many extra complexities introduced by the abstractions of a high level environment like the Windows API add very little value but end up confounding the development process, severely impacting development time and racking up a lot of extra costs. Our organization has been using a text mode DOS-based Clipper system for the last 10 years and it has been able to cope through years of intense growth (sales which put the company in the top 500 category). Despite its running in text mode, it is pretty complex and to this date, no one has been able to successfully migrate the system to a Windows-based one (i.e. VB-based). I believe this is a story that has been repeated many times for many organizations for which the transition to Windows from DOS-based systems have ended as failures or brought dubious benefits (i.e. greater cost and complexity headaches for little or no real additional functionality). I remember many developers (like me) had a great resistance towards moving to Windows from DOS, one of the most important reasons being the added complexity. Mastering the critical APIs (user input, screen display and printer output) is a lot harder with Windows than with DOS and I believe this is one of the most direct reasons for so many failed/unfinished Windows projects. Ironically, despite the supposed advances of Windows, most of these difficulties have little to do with the task at hand (business logic) and are instead concentrated on wrestling with UI and printing issues. What makes life difficult for developers also end up hurting end-users in the form of more bugs and longer development cycles. Considering that Windows' graphical environment and business-oriented development tools and APIs are already a lot more mature and problem free than those available for X/Linux (I specifically have Kylix CLX vs. Delphi VCL components in mind here), deploying a GUI app on the latter would likely be even riskier. Linux has a pure text mode and direct device access (like for the printer) and offers the same kind of immediate simplicity that the DOS environment used to offer. In addition it offers all the important OS features (preemptive multitasking, a real 32-bit kernel, and true protected mode stability) that Win 3.x to Windows ME paid only token attention to. NT, 2K, XP and beyond FORCE you to give up the simplicity of the old DOS programming environment in order to take advantage of these 'real 32-bit' OS features, but with Linux, you don't have to. Moreover, there is no shortage of very powerful and effective software, open-source or otherwise, in both the language (Perl, Python, gcc) and data management (PostgreSQL, Firebird, MySQL) areas. Because of this, the Linux text mode environment offers the improvements that DOS database developers were asking for while not only retaining the old simplicity, but actually improves on it! (i.e. SQL is both easier to use and more powerful than Xbase, the same applies to Python vs. Clipper) Moreover, it does so with little onerous additional hardware requirements so that you can often continue using your older hardware when converting over to new Linux-based ones. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
