[mahmud]

In the words of the great Walter Sobchak: "you're entering a world of pain".

The best advice I can offer you is to wrap up your application's functionality into a clean library that could be made into remote services (RPC, SOAP, CORBA, COM, etc. or preferably JSON-RPC or XML-RPC) then make a a VMWare image (or similar) virtualization tool of the app and its environment. You could still use the code that way from any platform, but it's pretty much stagnant and all new improvements and extensions will either have to be made on Win32, or as external interface wrappers to augment a limited shell.

Code reuse was already hard enough, but the RAD tools and IDEs made it considerably so. You can't believe how many shops keep Visual Studio 6.0 installation just to build their projects, because later version of VS frobbed the building process and screwed up old resource files.

I dread to think of the future that awaits stuff running on the Java stack that can't be built without tools from now defunct vendors.

[mTh]

Nice idea. But what if we succeed to separate the GUI (which will be platform dependent) from the other code which will be total cross-platform?