CXross-platfom development vs platform-centric
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Can anyone point me to some references that decribe the differences in prodcutivity, efficincy, reliability, etc. of cross-platform vs. platform-centric (ie Windows only) development? I'm working on a project that at the moment is Windows-only.. However, some wags in the company want to change to a cross-platform approach (Mac/Win). I've always been of the impression that platfom-centric development results in a better product, quicker to market, easier to maintain and upgrade, etc. However.. all things considered, maybe I'm wrong. Opinions welcome, of course, but I'd really like to see some studies, accademic papers, well thought-out editorials, etc.
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Can anyone point me to some references that decribe the differences in prodcutivity, efficincy, reliability, etc. of cross-platform vs. platform-centric (ie Windows only) development? I'm working on a project that at the moment is Windows-only.. However, some wags in the company want to change to a cross-platform approach (Mac/Win). I've always been of the impression that platfom-centric development results in a better product, quicker to market, easier to maintain and upgrade, etc. However.. all things considered, maybe I'm wrong. Opinions welcome, of course, but I'd really like to see some studies, accademic papers, well thought-out editorials, etc.
Well, if you were to develop for .NET, then it will be likely you'll be able to port to Mac eventually ;) Seriously, there are lots of cross platform frameworks. Yes, they tend to bload your product and often give you bugs that you can't fix, but hey... that's the price for picking up an additional 10% potential market share ;) Mac/Windows is particularly troublesome though because of the very different API the Mac has versus Windows/Unix/pretty much any other OS.
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Can anyone point me to some references that decribe the differences in prodcutivity, efficincy, reliability, etc. of cross-platform vs. platform-centric (ie Windows only) development? I'm working on a project that at the moment is Windows-only.. However, some wags in the company want to change to a cross-platform approach (Mac/Win). I've always been of the impression that platfom-centric development results in a better product, quicker to market, easier to maintain and upgrade, etc. However.. all things considered, maybe I'm wrong. Opinions welcome, of course, but I'd really like to see some studies, accademic papers, well thought-out editorials, etc.
I have been developing cross-platform applications for the last five years and to be honest it is easy there is no special trick. We develop using MFC on NT then port to Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX. Yep we support all UNIX platforms, who do we do this you may ask ? The answer is WindU, www.bristol.com, I do not work for them, but I must say its a great product for porting you applications to UNIX. And before you ask its not a tiny DB client, is it a full blown workstation CAD applications using distributed processing and OpenGL visualisation. Check you products out at www.moldflow.com. So you see you can be platform centric and cross platform, you do however have to be careful not to use all the latest and greatest MS gizmos.
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Can anyone point me to some references that decribe the differences in prodcutivity, efficincy, reliability, etc. of cross-platform vs. platform-centric (ie Windows only) development? I'm working on a project that at the moment is Windows-only.. However, some wags in the company want to change to a cross-platform approach (Mac/Win). I've always been of the impression that platfom-centric development results in a better product, quicker to market, easier to maintain and upgrade, etc. However.. all things considered, maybe I'm wrong. Opinions welcome, of course, but I'd really like to see some studies, accademic papers, well thought-out editorials, etc.
There are several crossplatform tools that I use that don't seem to have any aditional problems. Checkout WinCVS which has a Mac and Linux port, its a very complex system that works well on many platforms. the key(if your not using some special toolkit that helps) is to simply abstract anything that is platform dependant. so you have all the gui stuff in one interface and you rewrite the interface for the platform. its not as hard as some people make it seem if you do it well.