HP-UX HB v13.00 Ch-11 - Software Development

HP-UX Handbook – Rev 13.00 Page 37 (of 101)

Chapter 11 Software Development

October 29, 2013

Products On HP-UX

There are a lot of different high level programming languages. Most of them are grown

historically and have a focus on certain types of applications. The following list shows the most

commonly used languages and their focus:

Language

Focus

URL

system programming

http://www.hp.com/go/c

C++

object oriented, technical programming

http://www.hp.com/go/c++

Fortran

numerical calculations

http://www.hp.com/go/fortran

Java

server applications, platform independent

http://www.hp.com/go/java

On HP-UX there are development environments available for all these programming languages.

A development environment consists of more than just the compiler. To build an application,

compiler and linker are required, and to run it a runtime environment is needed. In addition there

are tools for organizing the build process, development in teams and for analyzing objects,

libraries and executables.

The basic development environments are a collection of command line tools, but professional

software developers prefer to work with an integrated development environment (IDE). IDE's

provide a graphical user interface and bundle the tools in one application and make the

developer’s life a bit easier. HP's Softbench is such an IDE, but it will not be discussed here.

While programming languages are good to create special purpose programs, it is not practical to

execute a series of operating system commands with them. At this point the tools of choice are

scripting languages. Consider a simple Unix shell command like

$ ls -l | more

The effort of programming this in C or any other language would be immense compared to this

single line.

The sections in this chapter will cover the following themes:

 Development Tools

 Runtime Environments

 Java

 Scripting Languages