[Oz] Re: development plans?

[Denys Duchier]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to ps.oz.support as well.

tege at linuxmail.org (Tommy Grünfeld) writes:

> 1. To what extent can I get support from you?

I think we are pretty good at responding to problem reports and
requests for assistance (unless we are otherwise tempoarily tied up
with academic deadlines :-).  The Mozart consortium, however, consists
of research institutions and, as such, doesn't offer support services
through contractual channels.

> 2. Which platforms can moz curently run on and which future plans do
> you have for extending the number of platforms? As far as I can tell
> it can run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows. What about *BSD,
> MAC, HP-UX, etc concerning running it both as applet and
> application?

In the past, Mozart has been known at various points to also work on
HP-UX, OSF1, and FreeBSD.  I don't know if this is still the case.  I
think FreeBSD ought to be easy to check, but we don't have access to
other types of machines.  I added support for LinuxPPC and I have
confirmation that it works.  There was an attempt at compiling it for
Tru64 for which I provided help but I haven't heard of the progress
since then.

We would be very grateful for people volunteering to attempt compiling
Mozart for new or untested platforms.  We are of course ready to
provide assistance in this process (if only to add a new platform to
the list of recognized platforms needed for configuration and proper
operation).

> 3. Java is developing in quite a rapid pace, for instance Jini and
> mobile devices. Are you keeping up to Java funtionality on this
> perspective?

Java has huge corporate backing and it is exceedingly unlikely that we
will ever have that level of support for development.  Fortunately, we
have a much better language that doesn't require such disproportionate
efforts to get things done :-)

Regarding Jini and mobile devices, I think our Swedish partners are in
a better position to answer since they have special interest in these
areas.  In particular, they are working on developing a `light'
version of Mozart (OzLite) appropriate for small (portable) devices.

> 4. Currently am I developing JSP in Oracle 8.1.* with Oracles
> internal Visiboker. Is there any possibility to use similar
> architecture on for instance MySQL or PostgreSQL when using moz, or
> do I have to use 'external' ORBs?

I am also interested in MySQL, and my impression was that it would be
quite easy to provide bindings for its C API.  I haven't had time to
work on this myself, nor do I have a student willing to give it a
try.  It would be a tremendous boon for the user community if someone
contributed such bindings.

The system also contains a very rudimentary interface for PostgreSQL
in contrib/psql contributed by Lars Rasmusson.  It is not actively
maintained or developed, and is not built by default.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615

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