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1.1 The Cross-Platform Challenge

 Developing applications which can run on multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, UNIX or Macintosh systems, poses a real challenge to the software development community today. End users today expect to have applications available on many platforms, matching their heterogeneous hardware infrastructure. They also expect to have versions of your software introduced on all operating systems simultaneously.

The software challenge today is to develop and simultaneously introduce high quality applications on all popular platforms. The use of a single source tree using a standardized API, that has a proven track record is one strategy that can be used, but until now has lacked a viable cross-platform implementation of a sufficiently robust API.

Your solution is to develop to the de facto industry standard: the Windows API. This environment provides not only the broadest selection of development tools, it also caters directly to the largest segment of potential customers for your products. But how do you get from there to other environments, such as UNIX, Macintosh or even yet-to-be-developed systems? You use The Willows Toolkit for UNIX, Macintosh and embedded systems.



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