have we given up on cross platform.

[infinitelo]

Ive been looking at the last few posts, and see a trend toward choosing one platform or another. Have we come to the point of sacraficing run anywhere for a special set of widgets? Are the hardware venders taking sides? Are we choosing because of a pretty interface, a better wizard, or this thing is ugly but never crashes? Im not ready to give up but have been known to hold on after the handwriting is on the wall. Are there any projects out there taking up the banner where java left off?

if it is to be it's up to me

 

[rycamor]

Absoluuutely!! The trend I am seeing is that the corporate purchasers, not the vendors, have been the biggest obstacles to interoperability, but even they are starting to think twice. But the next generation of computer development is promising to be a lot more "x-platform" than what we saw in the 90s. It is true that many of the hardware vendors have been forced to take sides, because of Microsoft's strong-arm techniques, but it looks like the current legal environment is not going to allow them as much freedom in this area. In general, hardware vendors would rather NOT take sides, because this only reduces the potential sales, doing nothing to increase their bottom line.

Software is another area, though:

The open source guys, ironically, are the ones doing the most for for cross-platform interoperability, while the big companies are trailing along. Here are just a few examples:

http://www.openoffice.org

http://www.trolltech.com

(commercial, but open source friendly)

http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/

http://www.gtk.org

http://www.wxwindows.org

http://www.winehq.org

http://samba.org/samba/about.html

(Samba allows a Unix server to handle a Windows network)

One area where the cross-platform concept is really working great is web application development. PHP (

http://www.php.net)

and Apache (

http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/)

are perfect examples. PHP is almost as platform-agnostic as Java, and runs on more different operating systems than any scripting language I have seen besides Perl. The latest version of the Apache webserver, version 2.0.36, runs as well on Windows as it does on Unix. This is in sharp contrast to the previous releases in the 1.3.x family, which really had win32 support as an afterthought. So it is possible in many instances to develop a complete web-based application on your Windows workstation, and then deploy it to a large number of Unix servers, or even to have a mixed server farm environment.

On the commercial side, Apple OS X is actually much more platform independent than the old Mac OS used to be. It is based on FreeBSD Unix, so it can easily support the thousands of great tools and utilities available for Unix, as well as the new family of Mac software.

Most of the big vendors, such as Oracle, IBM, Sybase, etc... all have cross-platform versions of their software. Actually, the lack of cross-platform ability is most visible in the smaller software companies, especially the ones that develop industry-specific applications for, such as insurance quoting, medical billing, etc... (Honestly, many of these companies are still programming in DOS!!!) But I think those problems will also be ironed out as many of the operating systems themselves will be able to support different environments. Using the Wine windows API (

http://www.winehq.org),

for example, Linux computers can currently run about 95% of Windows applications, and there are several DOS emulators available also.

Really, the only large company out there that is causing trouble in this area is Microsoft, and even they are seeing the handwriting on the walls. They realize that the next generation of computer users is not going to put up with the idiocy we had to deal with in the 90s, so .NET, its major development environment, can actually be ported to other platforms. -------------------------------------------

"Now, this might cause some discomfort..."
(

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51274,00.html)