Chapter 2: Windows and UNIX Compared

Introduction

The UNIX Application Migration Guide was developed to help you migrate UNIX applications to the Microsoft Windows operating system. This guide provides the information you need to plan and budget your migration. It also examines methods for carrying out the migration, and provides guidelines on implementing and managing the final product.

By migrating your application to the Windows platform, you benefit from a widely used, full-featured operating system that runs the most popular business applications. With the addition of native UNIX packages such as Microsoft Interix, Windows can run many UNIX applications with a minimum of migration effort. The combination of the Windows platform and the Interix subsystem provides customers with a single enterprise platform on which they can run all of their Windows-based, UNIX, and Internet applications.

This guide is appropriate for managers, architects , and developers involved in the process of migrating an application from UNIX to Windows. Individual chapters cover the different aspects of the migration ” including analysis, planning, porting of code, and testing of the migrated application.

This chapter gives an overview of the development and production environments in both Windows and UNIX. However, before you begin to plan your migration, it is important that you have a good understanding of both operating systems, their terminology, and the key differences between them.