Most of my work is web development, often stand-alone reports. The production environment is always mod_perl installed on some *nix variant connecting to Oracle. But, the development environment often differs. Some places, I've worked on my on Linux box. Some places, I've been handed Exceed. Others, I used 4-6 telnet/ssh windows from my Win32 box to the development server.

This past week, I started a new contract, doing report redevelopment. (As a side note, I didn't know that Oracle9i has an embedded Apache server!) I was expecting to be told to use Exceed or some other emulator. So, I was surprised to hear that I should use Cygwin.

I've played with Cygwin before, but never seriously. I started setting things up and found the following:

  1. It's really cool to have your development windows and your testing windows both on and going against the same machine.
  2. Being able to reconfigure the Apache server without messing anyone else up rocks.
  3. Being able to download Oracle 9i Personal and having the complete environment under your control is amazing.
  4. Cygwin is extremely well put together.
  5. I can CVS all my source code. Using PVCS, I can use a remote repository that's shared with others.
  6. Transferring files between my Win32 box and my *nix development account is, well, not an issue.
  7. That annoying cut'n'paste crap that Exceed puts you through is gone.

If you haven't tried it out as a development environment, I heartily recommend you do so.

(Before anyone says anything, I am not recommending Cygwin as a production environment - just a development one. I understand the performance hit mod_perl takes under Cygwin.)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

20031109 Edit by BazB: Changed title from 'Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin'

In reply to OT: Happily developing on Windows, thanks to Cygwin by dragonchild

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