InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
February 22, 1999
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"We probably would have needed a year or so [to port the program]," Ramjist says. With Nutcracker, even with the recoding needed to standardize the C code, creating an NT version of the Unix code took only about three months, with one programmer working full time and two others working part time on the task.
Still, RBC Dominion Securities is not in a hurry to port everything to NT. Most of its applications will remain on Unix for the foreseeable future, so using Nutcracker is a good choice for similar projects, rather than writing NT-specific versions of existing Unix programs that might look more like a finished NT application but not run under Unix any longer.
Five years after the product's debut, DataFocus estimates that as many as 300,000 programs have been ported to NT using Nutcracker. The current version, 4.1, shipped late last year. It adds support for applications running under Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, which adds multiuser access to NT Server. Since many Unix systems use terminals to let users access the applications running on a central server, Terminal Server support helps create a similar environment for the rehosted Unix application when it is run on NT.
Version 4.1 also features compatibility with Microsoft's recently shipped NT Services for Unix, as well as enhanced support for the Component Object Model, Microsoft's information model for distributed computing. Because the software supports COM, applications that have been ported using Nutcracker can interact easily with other Windows applications.
And, in a move that analysts and users say strengthens Nutcracker's position and assures its longevity, DataFocus announced in late January that it was acquired by longtime Unix tool vendor Mortice Kern Systems Inc. One reason analysts say the combination makes sense is that Nutcracker already includes a bundle of MKS's tools, such as a Unix shell or development environment for NT. The merger will also simplify licensing of the two vendors' products for customers who use both.
"We've used MKS's tools for a long time, so now there won't be two sublicenses to oversee," says Mentor Graphics' Klein.
All of these developments bode well for DataFocus, which has helped time-strapped companies see serious competitive advantages by cutting development time from as long as a year to three or four months. But Alta Analytics Inc. achieved even more dramatic results. The vendor of data-visualization software for the insurance industry moved key code for its applications over to NT from Unix in one day.
The 9-year-old company has developed a line of data-visualization products, called Netmap; the applications analyze insurance claims data as well as graphically zero in on areas where behaviors indicate insurance fraud might be taking place. Alta Analytics offers versions of its products on HP-UX, Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX, and now on NT. But it maintains a single code base under Unix.
"The infrastructure was pretty much integrated and done within a day, although initially we had to do a little hand coding" to make the code ANSI C-compliant, says Kevin Delloyd, a senior technical architect at ALTA Analytics. "Moving over to NT, we didn't want to do a native port [such as completely rewriting the application]--going to that using Nutcracker was absolutely a cinch."
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