From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Sep 17 2004 - 15:09:33 CDT
Philippe waxed lyrical about the advantages of platform-independent
development:
> Isn't Java hiding most of these platform details, by providing unified
> support for platform-specific look and feel? Aren't there now many PLAF and
> themes manager available with automatic default selection of the look and
> feel of each platform?
> Aren't there enough system properties in these development tools so that the
> application can simply consult these properties to autoadapt to the platform
> differences?
...
> It's certainly not easy, and there are tons of options, but writing a system
> wrapper once avoids many customer support costs later when a customer is
> furious of having paid for a product that does not work on his host.
etc. etc.
Which all completely misses the point that Unibook 4.0.1 is
written by *one* person, who is not a Java developer, who works
specifically on the Windows platform, who wrote the application
making tons of specific Windows calls, and targetted it at
the Windows platform.
However much you might want all software to be platform independent,
and run equally well on Windows*, Mac OS, Un*x, and anything else
you might care to indulge in, that isn't going to make *Asmus*
write a system wrapper for Unibook 4.0.1 or rewrite the program to
port it to a PLAF and themes manager.
Anyone who wants Unibook for Mac or Unibook for Unix is free to
take the concept and go off and write it in your spare time. And
if you architect it with a platform-independent system wrapper,
so much the better.
And since Unibook is "available free of charge for downloading"
I don't think that customers will be too furious for having paid
for a product that does not work on their host.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 17 2004 - 15:11:39 CDT