[aprssig] Rant - Cross platform portability
Gregg Wonderly
gregg at wonderly.org
Wed Sep 20 13:54:50 EDT 2006
Joel Maslak wrote:
> On Sep 20, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
>
>> Yep, many people doing software development in the HAM community
>> don't have enough training or information, or motivation to get it
>> right. That's a real problem for many people. Some argue that HAMs
>> ought to be smart enough to figure it out. I think it's important to
>> not waste unneeded time in peoples lives just because you can.
>
> Your definition of "get it right" and mine differ. Portability appears
> to be near #1 in priority for you. That's fine, and I respect it. To
> be honest, it's not near #1 for me - for me, writing code to solve *my*
> needs is #1 in priority, and #2 is to do it as quick as possible.
My comment was aimed specifically in response to conversation about winlink2000,
which is targeted at solving emergency communications problems. My view is that
this is a large target audience across a large number of OSes, languages and
training. Portability would seem important as would built in I18n support and
other features of platforms such as Java. For personal stuff, do what you
need/want to do. But, if you are thinking about letting a wide audience use
your software, there are a lot more considerations that could allow a lot more
people to take advantage of your efforts.
> I'd be all for someone starting an APRS GUI client project that is
> designed to be cross platform capable. I'd probably even run their
> software. But I'm not going to write it, nor am I going to criticize
> others who write non-cross-platform apps. Instead, if it bothers me,
> I'll do it myself. Otherwise I'll let other people make contributions
> to APRS that are different from the ones I might want to see in an
> ideal world.
I wrote http://jeaprs.dev.java.net about 4 years ago, advertised it here, got
zero interest in assistance with development. I don't have infinite time to
contribute, just like most are arguing here. I stopped at the point of
providing mapping, because I couldn't find a useful source of data that was
accurate.
Now, I have my http://aprskml.dev.java.net project going, and I'll likely take
the module architecture that I started with JeAPRS and push all those modules
into APRSKML. Thus, the mapping will be a secondary feature through google
earth or whatever KML system you have.
Gregg Wonderly
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