Windows programmer would like to come to Linux
 

Hello,
I've written a Talkback at
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3265717,00.html
and it got colored TB (recommended one) - TB #12

anyways, I said that I can help any person who needs help to come to linux, and I will answer as the best as I can,
So far I've helped 26 people to come to linux in just one day via the email.
But there's one specific person who had a question I couldn't answer and I'm asking you to answer this so I can reply him at the email.

Here it is, translated to English
# my comment : is it just me or this sentence is totally wrong? he wrote it in hebrew with english, I think it got mixed up or something#

Ask him what he thinks ERP stands for; there's a whole load of
possible (valid) expansions to that acronym.

Linux doesn't handle outlook or DDE (which, even in MS lingo, is
antiquated and superseded by COM and COM+ to the best of
my knowledge [which is quite meager, I try not to tuch that stuff]).

But there are tool-sets like DCOP or CORBA available, and with
Mono he should be able to utilise .NET to his hearts content.


Cheers,
Tink

hey tinkster !
ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning

link for ERP FAQ
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=re...Axkkf4Cyus8AgA


do you think u can tell me more now ?

If he's using Oracle for his stuff there should be no holding back :}

Linux is Oracle preferred development platform.



Cheers,
Tink

Java and Java Beans come immediately to mind as the main competition to Microsoft's COM/ActiveX through the late 90s. There are plenty of COM::Java bridges available. For both Linux and Windows.

Of course, Java runs equally well on both Linux and Windows. And is big in the "enterprise s/w" arena, where Oracle, IBM, Computer Associates, Siebel and that crowd hold sway (selling high-end setuff like ERP packages).

As Tinkster already said, DDE is wildly obsolete (it came out around the time as Windows 3.0, and was quickly superceded by COM). And DDE isn't really about components (like Java Beans or COM/ActiveX), and isn't really distributed, either. It's basically just a dopey form of IPC.

As tinkster also said, COM itself has been superceded by COM+ (really just an update to COM) and by .Net.

And .Net is all about web services. Which is (by definition!) platform- and language agnostic. Web services is involves XML, UDDI, WSDL and all that Good Stuff. It is *not* necessarily tied to a specific platform, or specific API, and *certainly* not to any specific programming language. Uncoincidentally, "web services" is an area in which Linux definitely excels!

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Well, "dot-net" unfortunately was designed for "web services with a fishhook hidden inside." While it is fairly agnostic with respect to the browsers and such that can interface to it, it's rigidly fixed on the Windows OS. (Surprise... :rolleyes: )

The biggest "shift" for a Windows programmer coming to the Linux platform is that, whereas in Windows there is basically "one way" to do something (namely, Microsoft's latest way), Linux and Unix do not have a single overweening vendor calling all of the shots. There are several ways to accomplish the same thing.

Furthermore, there is much less "fixed infrastructure" in the Linux environment. Windows has a lot of DLLs and subsystems and daemons that are basically "there, no matter what," whereas Linux has relatively few mandatory parts.

For example, it is perfectly plausible for a Linux system to be running with no graphical user interface at all. It might support graphical access by means of XWindows or XOrg, while it has no graphic hardware installed on its own motherboard; or everything might be done with terminal shells. If there is a GUI, it could be one of several variations, and different users might be using different ones simultaneously. And so on.

So, at first, the Windows programmer might feel very much "adrift." But then the various concepts start clicking together again. There is a direct corollary for a DLL; there are pipes and shared-memory segments and threads and processes and mutexes and semaphores and so-on. But the system is far, far more loosely coupled than is Windows. It clearly shows the influences of, not just a single vendor, but hundreds... over a span of time about twice as long as Microsoft Windows has existed.

And I'll firmly maintain this opinion: you need to learn this stuff, and you need to start learning it now. You will not remain competitive in the marketplace if you do not have the ability to work in the Linux system and to bring that system together with Windows and with other types of systems. And, until such time that this cross-platform ability becomes more common, it will be $highly$ $prized.$ :D

what languages u recommend me to learn?