FunnelWeb Stability

One of the dangers of becoming involved with a language tool such as FunnelWeb is that you become dependent upon it. If FunnelWeb were to stop working for some reason, your .fw files would become unuseable. This can happen because of operating system upgrades, copyright problems, unfixable bugs, or just the inability of the program to be ported to a new target platform.

I am critically aware of these issues, and have taken the following steps to ensure that FunnelWeb provides a stable base upon which to build software:

Open source: FunnelWeb's C source code has been released under GNU General Public License Version 2. This means not only that FunnelWeb is available free of charge, but that the source code to FunnelWeb is available to you free of charge too. If a FunnelWeb executable ever stops working, you can compile a new version on your platform. If ever you run up against a serious bug, you can always fix it.

Portability: FunnelWeb has been designed and written to be extremely portable. First, all FunnelWeb really does is read and write text files, which are very portable operations. Second, FunnelWeb is written in the C programming language with portability as a major design goal. Third, FunnelWeb has already been ported to many popular platforms (including Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and OpenVMS) and will probably compile on many others, with almost no change. Fourth, FunnelWeb comes with a comprehensive automated regression test suite that makes it easy to pinpoint problems when it is moved to a new platform. All this amounts to an assurance that if you have to migrate to a new platform, FunnelWeb can migrate with you.

Quality: The FunnelWeb source code is stable high quality code. Design decisions have not been taken lightly. FunnelWeb V3.0 has been in daily use since its release in 1992, and the few bugs that were found were all fixed in FunnelWeb V3.2.

Documentation: FunnelWeb is comprehensively documented by the FunnelWeb Reference Manual, the FunnelWeb Tutorial Manual and the FunnelWeb Developer Manual. These manuals, plus the source code, provide the ultimate reference for any questions about FunnelWeb you may have.

Language stability: To protect your investment in the FunnelWeb language, I intend to ensure that future versions of the official version of FunnelWeb maintain backwards compatibility so that existing FunnelWeb files can always be processed. Having done most of my programming since 1986 using FunnelWeb, I am not in a position to compromise on backwards compatibility!

It is my hope that together these elements will eliminate any fears you may have about the stability and availability of the FunnelWeb language.