Re: [Opalvoip-user] Anniversary

[Jan W. <ja...@wi...>]

Congratulaions on the anniversary and keep up the good work!

Jan

-- 
Jan Willamowius, Founder of the GNU Gatekeeper Project
EMail  : ja...@wi...
Website: http://www.gnugk.org
Support: http://www.willamowius.com/gnugk-support.html

Robert Jongbloed wrote:
> This is an announcement that the Portable Tools Library (previously 
> Portable Windows Library) had it's first code cut between Christmas and 
> New Years 1992.
> 
> That is 20 years ago, and it is still going strong!
> 
> There were a few major events in computing during the 1991-1992 period 
> that inspired Craig Southeren and myself to start a project that 
> subsequently so dominated our professional careers. Not necessarily in 
> order of importance:
> 
>   * Windows 3.1
>   * Microsoft C++ compiler version 7.0
>   * Linux
>   * GNU C++ compiler version 2.x
>   * XFree86
>   * MacOS System 7
>   * Codewarrior C++ compiler (actually late 1993, but ...)
> 
> Seeing all these pieces and wanting to "write cool applications" we also 
> did not want to limit ourselves to one of the three camps. In those days 
> the concept of "portability" was "which version of Unix are you using?", 
> and the rise of autoconf. The Windows people really did not want 
> anything to do with the Unix people, and vice versa. And the Mac people 
> looked down on both the others. Attitudes that still exist to this day, 
> I might add.
> 
> So, after many a Wild Turkey fuelled discussion, we decided we needed a 
> portable library to abstract the different operating systems so we could 
> "write once, port to all".
> 
> I had been working with Object Oriented systems for a couple of years at 
> that time, and was thoroughly sold on the methodology. The "pure" OO 
> languages such as Smalltalk or Actor didn't really do it for me, even 
> though, like Java today, their big selling point was portability. Both 
> Craig an myself had spent a lot of our careers up to that time rather 
> close to the solder, so these slow, bloated, garbage collected, high 
> level systems didn't appeal. Memory and CPU was not as abundant as it is 
> today!
> 
> As long time C code cutters, the idea of a language that was C "with 
> bits on" was very attractive to us. Though over the years I personally 
> have had a love/hate relationship with the C++ language. Many incredible 
> things have been done, but sometimes the arcane syntax, especially for 
> template, and the inexplicable error messages from the compiler have 
> made me long for alternatives! They came, but too late, by that time we 
> had a huge investment in written code.
> 
> So, the basic concepts for the library were formed: object oriented, 
> natively compiled, truly portable, with both low level OS services and 
> high level GUI abstractions.
> 
> The first things written were the "container" classes. You can't do very 
> much in programming until you have arrays lists, trees, dictionaries 
> etc. Bear in mind this was before STL was common, let alone portable! 
> There was an early design decision there that turned out to be ... wrong 
> ... though in concept it is similar to STL. That was, every container, 
> be it a list, sorted list, tree, whatever, should be able to be iterated 
> in the same way. The mistake was I chose an integer to do it with, 
> rather than an iterator class. This produces some performance and a 
> */lot/*//of multi-threading issues, and was eventually abandoned. We 
> have iterators like STL now.
> 
> Then came abstractions for files, directories, sockets, threads, sound, 
> video etc. On top of these classes to handle standard protocols like 
> POP3, HTTP etc were written, to support some applications we were doing 
> at the time. And these new classes were able to be written once, 
> identically, for all supported platforms. The concept worked.
> 
> Abstractions for windows, menus, dialogs etc were also done. Microsoft 
> Windows led the way, but Unix was a mess. We had partial implementations 
> for straight X, then rewritten to Motif, and I think another widget set 
> that I can't remember. Macintosh had some work done but it was always 
> the poor cousin due to lack of hardware and resources. There are some 
> tiny vestiges of that in functions like PString::ToPascal().
> 
> As the millennium headed to it's conclusion, the applications we were 
> writing tended to be "server" based and not "user oriented". The GUI 
> code continued to lag while many more classes were added to do protocol 
> stuff. Including the first cut at doing this new thing "Voice over IP" 
> using this protocol H.323. Then, how did /that/ take over our lives! 
> I'll leave that story for it's 20th anniversary.
> 
> It took a few more years, but eventually calling the system the Portable 
> /Windows /library was becoming silly. No one, including us, used the 
> widows abstractions. Things like Qt and wxWidgets were available they 
> were concentrating on the GUI side while we were doing OS/protocol 
> stuff. So it was renamed to the Portable Tools Library. You still see 
> references to "pwlib" in various places.
> 
> Here we are, couple of decades later, wondering if OPAL should be 
> switched to boost or something, and rejecting the idea because, 
> fundamentaly, PTLib really does a lot of things well, at least in my 
> mind, But then I /am/ biased! :-)
> 
> 
> Finally, and I am sure I am speaking for Craig too, I would like to 
> thank all of the contributors to PWLib, PTLib, OpenH323 and OPAL over 
> the years. It has been a long road, and simply would not have been 
> possible without your support and tolerance.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> *Robert Jongbloed*
> /OPAL/OpenH323/PTLib Architect and Co-founder./
> Commercial support at http://www.voxlucida.com.au
>