Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2001/12/Okay, so there’s this thing called Java–not the coffee, but the programming language. It’s really cool and magical. If you write a program on a Windows machine in Java, then move it to a Unix machine, it just works. It works, even if it is a very advanced XML-based server. That is, unless your Java program written under Windows avoids doing a few things…
- assuming that all directory names are separated by a “\” instead of a “/” or the constant File.separator.
- assuming that there is no such thing as security, and proceeding to open files for reading and writing that it should not do.
- assuming that there is no such thing as security, and proceeding to open sockets left and right.
- assuming that “install” means clicking on a self extracting executable that extracts Tomcat, Apache, the Java Runtime, the Java code, and Sun’s iPlanet Message Queue to C:\, all preconfigured with no way of running it from another disk or set of directories.
- assuming that it is okay to use the filesystem as a relational database instead of a relational database as a relational database.
- assuming that when you run the batch file to start up Tomcat, Apache, et.al. you will always be in a given directory so that all the relative paths magically work correctly.
- assuming that there is no reason to document the source code, because it already works and there’s no need to fix or change anything.
- …probably several other items I cannot remember at present…
Well, back to my SPAM-turkey, cheese, and horseradish toasted on homemade whole wheat sandwich…
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