Re: portability

From: Karsten Farrell <kfarrell_at_belgariad.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 16:51:56 GMT
Message-ID: <MADS9.699$o65.49502330@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>

Niall Litchfield wrote:
> "dmz17" <dmz17_at_nospam.nowhere.com> wrote in message
> news:pan.2003.01.05.21.56.48.283429_at_nospam.nowhere.com...
>

>>If I had my way, nobody would use PL/SQL because they would not be
>>portable.

>
>
> And If I had my way people would analyse their business needs, buy or
> develop an app to meet them and then stick with it as long as the business
> needs required. If you are changing one thing (as portability implies) then
> you can be damn sure the business has changed. Portability (like object
> orientation or almost any other buzzword you can think of) suits developers
> far more than end users and businesses.
>
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
>

I have to agree with you Niall. Even for developers, portability can be a difficult, moving target.

For example, ColdFusion allows you to write SQL statements to display dynamic web content. Management said we had to write all SQL so it was portable between Sybase, SQL Server, and Oracle. Have you ever tried to write lowest-common denominator SQL? Until more recent versions, Oracle insisted on '(+)' as an outer join instead of the ANSI 'outer join' and Oracle's nvl(col) is not the same as isnull(col). And why would I want to live without decode?

And HTML is so non-portable between web browsers as to be a joke. And lots of Java code has to be rewritten every time a new JDK comes out. And MS C++ with MFC is not portable to a Borland IDE. And in the old days I had to rewrite all my Sperry-Univac Fortran routines to make them run on CDC.

So I think portability should be *one* of the requirements ... but somewhere down at the bottom of the priority list. Like Niall said, software should conform to business rules ... not business conform to software rules. Received on Tue Jan 07 2003 - 10:51:56 CST