[aprssig] Rant - Cross platform portability
Brian Riley
brianbr at mac.com
Sun Sep 17 21:43:22 EDT 2006
Bravo, well said , and well done ... as a mainly Mac, but PC and
Linux and lotsa little MCUs guy. I really appreciate it when I see
these kind of efforts.
---
cheers ... 73 de brian riley, n1bq , underhill center, vermont
<http://web.mac.com/brianbr/> Tech Blog
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On Sep 17, 2006, at 9:12 PM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> Jim Lux wrote:
>> Gregg makes some comments about the availability of software for a
>> variety of environments, and that triggers some comments about
>> software development, not necessarily directed at Gregg
>> personally, but at a general misunderstanding of how and why
>> software gets developed.
>
> Hi Jim, I guess I stirred up some emotions. Without going after
> every point that you enumerated in your response, let me just say
> that I've been developing software in a number of environments over
> the past 20+ years. I have a masters degree in software
> development focused in areas of operating systems and computer
> language development. I've developed windows software, unix
> software extensively, and 10 years ago started using Java for all
> of my core application development. So, I have some experience to
> draw on for my opinions.
>
> If you will search on the internet for "gregg wonderly java jini
> software" you will find that I have about 10 open source projects
> visible in the communities related to my interests. These
> projects, include a complete replacement for Echolink, written in
> Java, which runs, without ANY porting needed on windows, linux and
> mac os-x. Because Java provides a nice abstraction to the sound
> system, I don't have to know about how that works. Because Java
> provides a "look and feel" abstraction, the OSes native graphics
> subsystem is abstracted for me and all the font sizing, spacing and
> layout is taken care of for me.
>
> When I started openlink, I had some free moments. When I got GUI
> done after a couple of weeks of spare time work, I started looking
> around for PSK-31 libraries to copy by translating to Java. As I
> said, unfortunately, these libraries are optimized with ASM code,
> or are otherwise tied into a particular environment.
>
> On any of the existing OSes that are in consumer computers, you
> will always have scheduling pauses related to timesharing of the
> CPU. Your comments about the speed of Java seem to be based on old
> experience or some third party comments. I have large scale
> production systems running on Java with massive throughput and not
> problems with performance. The Sun Just In Time (JIT) compiler can
> typically equal or better many C and C++ compilers of the same
> algorithms because of the depth of analysis and the fact that they
> compile with runtime knowledge about the actual execution paths and
> frequency of passes through the code.
>
> I stick by my comments that there is no reason that Amatuer radio
> software should not be being developed as cross platform.
>
> We all had to study for and take a test to demonstrate our
> knowledge. Taking the time to learn more about software
> development seems like a good idea to me. I've spent my life
> learning about software and contributing software for others to use
> freely.
>
> Allowing everyone to take advantage of your efforts is one way to
> let others spend their time being productive doing something
> besides repeating your work so that they can have the benefits. If
> you can't spend the time to learn how to do something different
> than what you are doing now, I accept that as a fact of your life.
>
> I still think it's a good idea for all Amatuer Radio software to be
> portable across OSes.
>
>> While the sentiments expressed by Gregg are wonderful, there's a
>> fairly big gap in the ability to do "write once, run everywhere"
>> software, except for the most trivial of applications. Web
>> browsers are about the closest thing that you see, and you'll note
>> that there are numerous incompatibilities, even with fairly simple
>> HTML. There are also "market realities" to consider, some of
>> which I touched on initially.
>
> Jim, maybe you can tell me which Java application(s) you have
> developed. How many lines of code, type of application etc. Which
> versions of the Java specification has it ran on, and what problems
> you encountered? I'm always interested in hearing what other's
> experiences have been using Java. You seem to have some opinions
> about Java and I'd like to learn what experience those are based on
> so that I can better understand them.
>
> Thanks for sharing you thoughts and experiences.
>
> Gregg Wonderly
> W5GGW
>
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