Coding according to environment/platform?

Question

Hello all experts here. In my project (an application, not applet), one problem bothers me is that the development environment and production environment is not the same. The development is on windows/XP, while the production is a unix box. In this application, I have to run some system command (e.g. via Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command), etc.). Obviously PC command and UNIX command are different. Also, I have to access some files in local system, and the path are different in devlopment and production environment.
Therefore, in my program, I have to make decision which system commands and which file paths I should use according to whether it's development or production environment. The approach I am using is pass an online argument to the program, if the argument is "1" then I choose dev action, if "2" I choose production action. But I feel this is really clumsy and unprofessional. I appreciate if you can give some professional suggestion to handle this gracefully.

Answer 1

I would suggest the following..
Create an inheritance hierarchy of classes that then interface to the OS level functions. For example, you can create these three classes:
public interface OSBroker {
// method signatures here for example...
    public void moveFile() throws SomeException;
public class WindowsBroker implements OSBroker {
// define OSBroker methods here for Windows
    public void moveFile() throws SomeException;
// define helper methods here
public class UnixBroker implements OSBroker {
// define OSBroker methods here for Windows
    public void moveFile() throws SomeException;
// define helper methods here
}Then you can have some controller code that calls sets up the OS broker object, like this:
OSBroker broker = null;
if ( windows ) {
    broker = new WindowsBroker();
} else if ( unix ) {
    broker = new UnixBroker();
}And then your code can call the broker's methods but not know the implementation. The advantage to this is that you can define the OS specific behavior in each class and then forget about it. Of course you'll have to test on both platforms but you'd probably need to do this anyway.
Additionally, you can still use all the properties files, etc.