Embracing and Extending OpenNMS

Let me start with a story. It's a story of answering a simple question in the #fink irc channel. What was my answer? It doesn't really matter. What matters is that I used "..\lib" in my response.

Why does it matter? OH GOD I JUST ACCIDENTALLY USED A BACKSLASH TO REPRESENT A PATH IN IRC!

That's right, this week I've been in the Land Of Evil, working on porting OpenNMS to Windows. I've been so heads-down into it, I actually started thinking in backslashes even in a Mac OS X channel. Oh, the shame. <grin>

Anyways, it actually (surprisingly!) mostly works. The hardest part was porting jicmp, which required setting up a mingw environment and fixing our configure stuff in a lot of ways. And I've gotta say, libtool and I have had our differences in the past, but it performed beautifully at hiding the details of making a .dll file out of our code.

There's still plenty left to do. The docbook stuff doesn't run right. Our GWT maven plugin inexplicably fails, even though the command-line it generates actually works manually. It will be a lot of work putting together an installer. But overall, it was much less trouble than I had expected.

Say what you will about Java, but out of our 250,000 lines of code, it took less than a week to go from 0 to proof-of-concept with code written entirely on UNIX-like systems.

Woot!