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NMF SPIRIT Issue 3.0 Platform Blueprint

NMF SPIRIT Issue 3.0 Platform Blueprint
Copyright © 1995 Network Management Forum

Introduction to Part 5

Organisation

Part 5, Application Portability describes application portability in the SPIRIT environment.

It is structured as follows:

Purpose

As noted in Part 1, Overview and Core Specifications, the aim of SPIRIT is to produce an agreed set of specifications for a general-purpose computing platform that ensures both application portability and interoperability.

Part 5, Application Portability defines those elements of a development environment necessary to ensure application portability.

This part summarises the concepts of application portability and the development environment specifications required to ensure application portability.

Requirements

Application portability is defined as the ability to make an application running on one open system run on another, regardless of the supplier, with minimal modification.1 Although application code can be ported in various forms, SPIRIT's definition of application portability involves porting applications at the source code level. Thus SPIRIT defines application portability as the ability to:

The first requirement is to provide the mechanisms for source code and reference data transfer. This is addressed by a source code transfer profile.

The second requirement is to preserve the application source code and maintain consistent operational semantics between the source and target platforms. This is addressed by the source code portability profile.

The major benefit gained from application portability is the reduction in the cost of modifying and maintaining applications when:

Additional benefits from application portability include:


Footnotes

1.
This definition is derived from X/Open XPG4.

2.
SPIRIT implementations may be distinguished by different combinations of software component implementations as well as different hardware architectures.


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