The Fins framework can be made to run in a Windows environment with very little effort. In fact, a sample development kit (we'll call it Fins/Win) is available by downloading Fins-0.9.5.zip. To use this, simply unpack the ZIP file and set your PIKE_MODULE_PATH environment variable to the Fins-0.9.5/lib directory. Alternately, you can use the -M command line option in Pike to do it all on the command line.

Once you've done that, you should have access to Fins via pike -x fins. Hop on over to Internals to continue on your journey.

Limitations

There are some limitations to running Fins on the Windows platform. Actually, most of the limitations are due to shortcomings in the Pike builds for Windows. As this situation improves, we expect Windows users to be able to take fuller advantage of the benefits that Fins has to offer.

A list of the known limitations in Fins/Win:

• Database support is limited to whatever your Pike has support for. This means that you won't be able to use SQLite directly, though Windows builds of Pike almost always include support for ODBC, and so you can use any ODBC driver within reason (the model hasn't really been tested for use by databases other than MySQL, Postgres and SQLite.) There is SQLite ODBC Driver available, though it hasn't been tested.
• Public.Parser.XML2 is not available for Windows yet. As a result, XSLT templates aren't available on Windows.
• Windows doesn't support fork(), so daemon mode isn't supported.

This list will be kept up to date as other limitations and workarounds are made available. That said, Windows can be a fine development environment, and there are possible options for production deployment, as well. Feel free to provide feedback if you're running Fins/Win.