View Source: CrossPlatform - Waikato Linux Users Group

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Code that runs on more than one platform.

Differnet people have different ideas about what CrossPlatform means. Most [Unix] people mean the code will run on other [Unix] platforms and probably implements/uses [POSIX] interfaces when they say "CrossPlatform".

Few applications are truly CrossPlatform. Because each platform makes a different set of assumptions, making the union of assumptions in an application requires N^2 implementation effort. Making the intersection leaves you with a painfully low level of functionality. Thus, most applications perform or integrate particularly well or badly on some set of nominally supported platforms.

Writing CrossPlatform [GUI]s is particularly difficult. Most ToolKit~s originating on [Unix] have been ported to many other systems: [Tk] and [GTK] are examples. [Qt] was designed from the very beginning to be CrossPlatform itself, and has ports for MicrosoftWindows and [X11]. [wxWidgets] is an attempt to provide a consistent [API] with binary-compatible binding libraries that allow code to run equally well will any ToolKit that happens to be available.

[Java] programs, even complex [GUI] ones like the the [Eclipse] [IDE], tend to be CrossPlatform without much effort. The same is true of programs written in dynamic languages like [Perl], [Python], [Ruby] and the like.

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[The Sysadmin's Rosetta Stone| http://bhami.com/rosetta.html] is a very useful web page that lists the comparable commands between any of the major [Unix]-like operating systems.  If you want to do the equivilent of fdisk(8) on Linux, but you're on HP-UX, then the Rosetta Stone can tell you its "lvcreate" or "sam".  (Hint: don't use killall on [Solaris]).

5 pages link to CrossPlatform:

Last edited on Friday, July 7, 2006 2:02:32 pm by CraigBox

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