Slashdot Mirror
Mono Ships ASP.NET server
Miguel de Icaza writes "We have just released the new version of Mono the new version includes a working version of ASP.NET. The release includes a sample web server that "hosts" the ASP.NET runtime (it can be hosted anywhere, for instance in Apache, with mod_haydn). The web features of ASP.NET would not be very useful without the support of a backing database. The new version of Mono includes database providers for Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, ODBC, OleDB, Gnome Data Access, SqLite, MySQL and of course, Postgres. The C# compiler is now 37% faster due to some nice optimizations on the JIT engine and in our class libraries. You can use it to develop GUI applications using Gtk#. Screenshots for mPhoto and the GUI debugger (which can debug both JITed apps and native applications). "
The volume of database providers in this release is the work of very few but very active hackers: Brian, Dan, Rodrigo, Tim and Ville. It is amazing the amount of code that these hackers pulled in the last two months.
It is easy to know when the System.Data hackers are working, your inbox gets hammered with patches from the mono-patches list.
You can help us support DB2, but you will have to get your hands dirty and start coding like the crazy hackers that brought all these providers (and Reggie has agreed to contribute his optimized provider as well).
Well, having ASP.NET is very convenient to move applications and components from Windows and deploy them on Linux or Unix systems. So I think that this is a plus on its own.
.NET offer a very interesting crossroads: the possibility of sharing components and existing classes independently of the language that was used to create it.
In terms of choices, I have to admit that I personally am more of an old school strongly-typed kind of person, and I like programming more with a language that I understand like C#. There is nothing wrong with PHP or Perl, but I feel a bit insecure with them. Like when you have to order water in a restaurant, and you do not want to look cheap, so you end up asking for `bottled water' even when you are trying to not spend a lot of money [1].
Mono and
I strongly believe that scripting languages are great for quickly building web solutions, and I would love to see more work between the PHP (and other scripting communities) and Mono. We are certainly interested in helping out.
For instance, the Mono runtime is easily embeddable, it could be used in existing systems with ease: for example, allow any language but use the PHP API to write web pages is one option (check the link for a few more samples and the tutorials), or hosting any programming language on Apache (as its done with the Apache/Mono module mod_haydn.
Miguel.
[1] Although as you grow older, you become more cynical, and you just tell the waiter `Get me a glass of the cheapest form of water you have'.
Good thing a:
If we can get a better "forms" implementation on 'nix (windows-like without windows bugs), that would be awesome
Secondly, but verrry important to those who do webhosting, clients requesting ASP pages would be able to run on 'nix servers, no longer requiring special windows dedicated hosts. For those who prefer 'nix servers, and many hosts do, running a windows server in the bunch is a pain in the butt!
If this actually pulls through, I will be amoung many who are very, very impressed.
Unisys were well aware of the widespread use of LZW GIF image compression in many vendors software, so it's better to use PNG.
one useful feature mono will hopefully provide is the ability to run .net programs on older _windows_ systems.
:) - microsoft doesn't support .net on windows 95 (presumably as part of their overall strategy to force upgrades by making their old os versions obselete).
.net applications (ones that don't call the win32 api and are thus potentially more portable) - the inability to do any multimedia stuff (even a simple beep) without resorting to win32 calls, makes it pretty much impossible for any reasonably large application :).
thats right
having written a windows forms application (the decision to use windows forms based on the fact that it really is one thousand times nicer than win32/mfc to create gui applications with), i was a bit shocked to find out that my application won't run under windows 95 at all, and that for other old microsoft OSes a TWENTY megabyte download is required to support it! (a bit of a jump from the one or two megabytes for the visual basic dlls).
and one further note - about 'pure'
Hmmm. Considering the amount of effort that was required to make WineLib work correctly on Linux/PPC, are you seriously planning the totally enormous investment of resources it'd take to port Wine to MacOS as well? Considering the primary motivations seem to be to improve GNOME development tools and increase Windows compatability, is the MacOS port just a throwaway comment or are there serious plans?
Only porting the core windowing and widget library would probably cut down the amount of work involved, but for instance Wine is heavily dependanct upon X11 currently....
You're talking about the The Middleware Company's "shootout" between their "optimized" PetStore implementation and their .NET version.
Laying aside that Sun never put the PetStore demo forward as a benchmark, The Middleware Company did a lot to optimize the .NET version that they did not do for the Java version. The fact that Microsoft was paying for the comparison may have had something to do with this.
Read Rickard Öberg's analysis of the comparison to learn all of the ways in which the comparison was flawed. To name just one, The Middleware Company announced that it took fewer lines of code in the .NET version to do the same thing, but they left methods in their Java version that were never even called anywhere in the code.
In addition, the .NET version did aggressive caching in memory, in such a way that it would be impossible to scale the code across more than one server, while the J2EE version was implemented using BMP, which robs an application server of the ability to do any caching whatsoever.
It goes on and on and on. Read the analysis for yourself.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
For instance:
Again, I'm trying to look at reasons why I would prefer PHP to ASP.NET, and it seems like there are reasons that you are convinced are compelling, so I'd be interested in hearing them.