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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). "
Mono? I don't feel well.
It's a weird experience to run the same exe in Windows and Linux with the .NET or Mono runtimes. When Mono supports WinForms (by translating them to Gtk#), so GUI apps written with Visual Studio .NET's GUI builder work on Linux, that will be significant.
Mono is some great stuff, but it's going to take some time before .NET matches up with J2EE on Windows, let alone on the UNIX platforms.
Gtk# is more interesting, I think.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I don't see anything about a port for Darwin/MacOS X on the Mono web site. A full Aqua-# project would of course be a lot more work, but it would be fun to see it started in console mode or X-windows.
Has anyone tried building Mono on MacOS?
I think this is terrific. I know very little about the fine details of coding for .NET, but I understand the significance of this project to the community of open source and non-windows users. Good job folks. Keep it up. =)
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
Further proof that more is accomplished through innovation than through litigation.
Although there is prior art examples of individual technologies such as the JVM etc, Microsoft patents such as the one mentioned, define and claim the interoperation of the components, in such a way that any re-implementations will be sure to be covered by the patents. This remains true even for the Microsoft specs submited to standard
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP). Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss...
There those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET reimplementation represents a pending legal mindfield.
It doesn't sound like much, but for porting a lot of business logic to Linux, this is a potentially huge development.
Another thing that's needed to get this project up to par with MS .NET is an IDE. Fortunately, the SharpDevelop
folks are working on that...
So far this project has been very impressive. Kudos to the Ximian folx.
Finding God in a Dog
what good is ASP or ASP.NET if we already have PHP you might ask. Well, firstly, ASP is a Microsoft product. If you don't know, Microsoft is a reputable software company that has been in business since 1975. PHP is just some silly freeware ASP clone hosted by a buch of computer geeks and hackers on some obscure website. Clearly a product from a major player in the software industry will be a better product.
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).
You reminded me of a cartoon I saw in Car&Driver years ago. It had an image of a screaming woman going over a cliff in a car, with the caption "Definition of Mixed Feelings: Watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your new Ferrari." Watching Mono develop is the geek equivalent.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Why are you so insecure that the very existence of another project gets you so worked up? Kinda sad, really, that you feel the need to spoil what should be a good brag moment for Miguel and company.
This is Miguel's announcement. Put your bile away and don't spoil it.
IANAL, but don't you lose your rights to a patent if you don't aggressively defend it?
Microsoft has publicly admitted their knowledge of Mono through publications such as MSDN and other places. They can't claim they haven't known about Mono, known its aims or known anything about what the project was capable of. I don't see how they can pursue a patent claim now - 12 months later - if my first paragraph is true.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
IANAL, but don't you lose your rights to a patent if you don't aggressively defend it?
No. You're thinking of trademarks. If you let a trademark get diluted in the marketplace, your claim to that trademark grows weaker, or even goes away entirely. Patents don't work like that.
I write in my journal
Actually MS has a spec' for non-Windows versions of .NET. This is what is to be used for the FreeBSD and Mac versions of .Net that MS is backing alreay. It is a subset of the CLR that needs to be supported.
No. That is for trademarks, not copyrights or patents. This is why xerox is a verb but Unisys was able to sue creators of GIF files.
What's the purpose of such a thing?
Are you also trying to peel off CORBA reliance?
Please explain your point of view, because I just can't understand why people are running away from COM as if it were the plague... and into this new swamp that is .NET.
Not to detract from Miguel and the Mono team here, but I can't help but think that there has to be a hidden message in the image he used for a screen shot... I can't quite put my finger on it...
Oh well <whistles>
Unisys were well aware of the widespread use of LZW GIF image compression in many vendors software, so it's better to use PNG.
Microsoft isn't really good at explaining itself in a rational manner because Bill has his head up his ass, and will not let his technical team talk. Instead his marketing team is in charge of explaining to the world what they do. As a result, .NET to me is something as low-level and small as a binary format specification (similar to COM objects), and as high-level and strategic as 'the end of non-distributed computing, and the emergance of <ooooh>Web Services</ooooh>'. Something that is so broad in breadth is not a clear definition in my books.
Is there anyone out there that knows why .NET should supercede COM or CORBA? Why the functionality of Web Services isn't merely provided as an implementation in COM model?
COM is a beautiful specification and model (so is CORBA - and the two are almost identical in fact)... they are compact enough to actually be usable in kernel mode (WMI providers in Windows are COM interfaces). So what is our eternal ass rash that makes us want to get the better suped up version of the same old shit?
I don't know about other programmers, and how they feel of all of this, but a new standard evolving every 5 years is way to much for me. And as such, I have yet to be convinced I should start learning anything in .NET. What have you, comrades, to say about this? Have you started using .NET, and have seen fundamental differences in principle that make obsolescence for COM a MUST?
On a side note, kudos to Mono for doing this work.
COM is language independant. It's a binary format with a small number of runtime environment support routines... it is not platform dependant. Incidentally, COM objects interacting with only other COM objects are also platform independant.
Platform independance is not a reason to supercede COM.
Please explain your point of view, because I just can't understand why people are running away from COM as if it were the plague
Um. Because
COM relies too much on windows APIs, it's not cross platform, it relies too much on the system registry and it only works on windows.
...what the heck is .Net? Now, before you drill me as a moron or a troll, hear me out.
.Net is and what it is supposed to provide (XML web services... OK.), but can anyone point me to a good primer on the matter?
.Net (WTF kind of name is that anyway?). I've got enough to keep me busy without having to worry "the next big thing".
I've some vague understanding about what
I've never even tried to keep up with
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
It almost seems like blasphemy to be able to compile and run Visual Basic in a linux environment. Yikes! What is this interoperable world coming to? What next, a paperclip for emacs? ;)
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Hmmm... Have you used COM before?
STDAPI CoCreateInstance( REFCLSID rclsid, //Class identifier (CLSID) of the object
LPUNKNOWN pUnkOuter, //Pointer to controlling IUnknown
DWORD dwClsContext, //Context for running executable code
REFIID riid, //Reference to the identifier of the interface
LPVOID * ppv //Address of output variable that receives
);
Can you tell me where you see the registry in there? Even malloc is shielded behind an IMalloc interface for crying out loud. The implementation of the runtime happens to use the registry, but that is COMPLETELY hidden to the actual spec of what COM is.
Yes but are those specs covered by a patent and will microsoft publicly state they will never pursue any lawsuits.
War is necrophilia.
Um duh. Yes I've been programming with COM for 5 years.
.NET allows "xcopy" installs. No registry entries, just copy the entire directory and you're done.
How do you tihnk CoCreateInstance constructs an object from a classid?
How do you think COM knows which IID relates to which interface?
Yes. The registry.
You have to register all com interfaces and objects in the registry.
COM simply wouldn't work without some kind of registry or repository.
Aside from that, CoCreateInstance might in a windows implementation look up the registry... but it might in a linux implementation look up a flat file, and on a BSD imp look in a sql db... it wouldn't change the behaviour of CoCreateInstance... And so, CoCreateInstance as a definition is not tied to any specific platform.
How do you think COM knows which IID relates to which interface
COM doesn't know that. IUnknown::QueryInterface (implemented by your object) knows that.
I really don't think Miguel and friends are motivated at the prospect of "over throwing the evil empire." Of course you would have to ask them though.
I don't think this project should be considered a counter attack. It should be considered an advancement in open source and nothing more. Just my opinion
...the "in soviet russia" jokes piss you off!
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Is the performance still acceptable and can compatibility be guaranteed? Chillisoft ASP is great if you're a commercial ISP or otherwise make money from hosting ASP stuff, and therefore can afford the price. But for the little educational student webserver, it's out of the question.
Can this compete? Or do the users have to learn a whole new brand of ".NET ASP" to do anything useful with it? I never knew anyone who uses ASP, so I never looked -- are there other free ASP-on-Linux solutions out there?
There are so many things wrong with that that it's hard to know where to begin:
Sun has renegged on several previous promises regarding Java: they failed to go through with standardization, twice, and they failed to deliver lots of functionality that they promised (e.g., value classes).
If Sun wanted to open up Java, they would go through a standardization process, identify all the relevant patents in question, and make a legally binding commitment as part of the standards process. Instead, we are just getting fuzzy promises while Sun keeps filing Java-related patents.
As far as I'm concerned, both Sun and Microsoft are greedy and untrustworthy, and the open source community would be foolish to throw their lot in with either company.
This may be a stupid question but does mono work on windows? Everything seems to imply it will but then the downloads section all seem to be for linux. I'd be interested in having a play with it on windows as it's the only environment available to me most of the time.
Sig is taking a break!
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'
Sun's patents, if anything, look much more worrisome. For example, patent 6,477,702 patents the basic Java bytecode architecture and can be used by Sun to shut down any competing implementation. Furthermore, despite lots of cheery announcements, there is no indication that Sun has made a legally binding commitment to license this patent freely for open source implementations, let alone competing commercial implementations. The way it looks to me is that Sun is just stringing the community along with promises, and they will change their tune when they feel that they have established a secure enough market position. Sun has broken lots of Java-related promises; they are not to be trusted either.
Does mono ship with a VD-compiler ?
Let me start by saying that programming COM objects is the most retarted way of programming functionality. True, using VB or Delphi, it is easy, but using f.e. C++, it's not. Read Don Box' book Essential COM to see what I mean.
.NET is kind of like the enhancement of what automation was set out to be: a common way for any COM object abiding to automation rules and specifications to be able to use the environment (such as data, variables etc) of the application without doing 'marshalling conversions' when switching between languages? (for example: using variants and safe arrays to access data both in C++ and VB). .NET is the replacement for the VB runtime for VB programmers, the C(++) Runtime / STL / Win32 lib for C/C++ programmers etc. It's the general target platform for _ALL_ CLS compliant languages (C#, VB.NET, J#, JSCript.net etc. C++ is partly CLS compliant, if you want to use templates or multiple inheritance, you can't).
.NET. The objects you create, run inside application domains, which is totally different than COM objects do, in relation to the SCM.
.NET, but its harder). Webservices is not a 'part' of .NET, you can build webservices WITH .NET. That's a different thing!
.NET api is the key of its success. Add to that the wonderful ASP.NET functionality (which is really years ahead of anything else) and the very good documentation of the API and you're set.
.NET and the amazing security featureset available to a developer and 2) that COM IS one of the causes of security leaks and DDos attack possibilities, simply because people forgot to use smartpointers and kept memory nonfreed. This is over now.
COM as a functionality is great, but it should have been more transparent for the developer, like VB did this: you just program classes and hey, check it out, they're COM objects now!. Using Visual Studio, creating COM objects was (at least using ATL) a bit painless, but don't try it using f.e. UltraEdit32 and no helper library.
So if I understand you correctly,
No.
The multi-language part is not a result of 'making it a better marshaller' or better 'automation platform', but simply a result because now all languages have the same API, the same functionality on board: it doesn't matter which language you pick, you can target the same API and use the same cool functions with ease in VB.NET as you can in C++.NET.
As a result of this, the code you compile will run in a VM. This VM, the CLR, is the heart of
Webservices is a term for a piece of 'logic' as I call it. Functionality. It's not 1:1 projectable on a piece of code, like 'that class can serve as the base class for all webservices'. This is due to the fact that a webservice, when you use SOAP f.e., depends on a lot of tiny building blocks to do whatever it should do. That's why it couldn't be another Interface. (I also doubt what that would have brought to the plate, you can create webservices using the new ATL extensions and using plain C++, thus not
About the productivity: Now people can use a language that suits their needs and preferences (f.e. I prefer C# over VB.NET, while I've developer a lot of COM objects for n-tier systems in VB) and use a much richer API than they ever could. It doesn't depend on MS' tools. Sure the new VS.net is great, but the rich
Also I don't see your kick in the balls towards IIS style security. To me this sounds like you really do not understand 1) the power of the strong typing inside
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Mono implements a piece of technology offered by Microsoft. There is no innovation there, at least not on the Mono part. Nothing wrong with that, but please, stop briinging the 'innovation' term into the discussion, since Mono is not about innovation.
.NET when Yukon (SQLServer 2003) comes out, late 2003, which will have generics support). However I don't see this happen soon.
It CAN be about innovation by implementing generics into the Mono runtime before MS does this (MS will release the updated 2.0
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
IE runs on a COM support layer, ported to Mac OS X and earlier version, plus Solaris/ HP-UX. The COM Specifications, written by the Open Group, is os/platform independent. It's the implementation which has to retrieve the CLSID to read the actual binary from disk (i.e. where it is located). But that moniker logic can be done without a registry entry on windows as well: a file moniker. (i.e. at runtime binding of a com object located in a file).
.NET. All MS and others (like Oracle has done with their System.Data provider) have to do is release .NET assemblies now.
I agree that there is no need for porting COM to Linux. COM was a great technology to provide functionality to a wide spread of languages. That is now taken care of by
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Do you really think that an editor that includes the mayan calendar by default wouldn't ALREADY have had clippy created.
Of course in Emacs he is called Pinhead and is much more helpful.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
No. You create references to assembly filesnames in your own assembly and with that also a version of the assembly so you can install multiple assemblies with the same filename. I can call my assembly FOO and the assembly file bar.dll. The compiler creates a reference to 'bar.dll' with a certain version. When I start the program with that reference, the CLR will look in the current directory for bar.dll to load the assembly objects I try to instantiate. If bar.dll is missing it will consult the GAC (Global Assembly Cache). If bar.dll is not found there, it's not loaded.
Mono is designed to be cross platform.
No. _.NET_ is designed to be cross platform, since the platform a class talks to, uses and consumes is
Supporting COM in
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
It is superb technology: a combination of many of the best features of Java, Delphi, C++, and Perl. It doesn't "reek" of anything. (Well, maybe of Java, if you think Java reeks.) Mono will make it possible to use the excellent ISO C# language, the excellent ASP.Net, and the excellent .Net class libraries, without ever leaving the excellent Linux platform or having to use any product from MS.
On the other hand, if you are less of an ideologue and more practical about technology, Mono makes it "safe" to use MS technologies when they are the best choice, because you don't have to make everything MS. You can order a la carte.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The strength of the .NET is directly proportional to the strength of the implementation of the .NET. Just because .NET comes on UNIX doesn't mean that all exploits against Microsoft's runtime magically start to work on these platforms - barring, of course, exploits that exploit design flaws in the platform rather than bugs.
Microsoft may have bugs in their platform that lets it execute arbitrary code - well, that bug likely may not be in Mono runtime. Or, the other way around!
And if you're less concerned about portability, ISO C# will make it possible to do some really powerful, native things on other platforms, such as Linux or Mac OS X (Cocoa).
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
And where do you think real exploits get born from? Kidding with scripts and playing "../../.."?
.NET architecture and the fact that it is deeply used for networked apps will surely mean a huge potential for exploits. C didn't have such a plague because it is not a network system per se. But its system libraries demonstrated long ago how one can get into deep trouble, due to the loosy structure of the language. Java on the contrary, was a system that was built for the network but with some concern on security. However, this costed the language some inflexibility, that was implemente to avoid certain risks. From both these systems, .NET takes the best and the worse. You may use C#, GTK#, VB or whatever. It feels like a Super-Mega-C library. However, this also means that I can put into the wagon a lot more things and interact it with even more. Can you talk about security in face of this situation? As a professional, I can tell you that no matter what bottom line you may take, .NET is a wild elephant on security. No one can make such a loose flexibility without freeing some fundamental security knots, the most important of them, a rapid and effective way to acknowledge critical situations. In a situation where you can face tons of libraries, apps and languages at once and in one place, it will be impossible to get a clear picture of a potential problem in minimal time. And that starts not in Microsoft's conspirations, but on the idea of creating a whole universal system for network apps that looks more as a can of worms.
Depending on the architecture of the algorithms and the philosophy of the implementantions, any system catches its environment of exploits. The loose connectivity of
You can use ASP pages on UNIX now if your really want to. Just look up Chilisoft on Google to see how.
The soon-to-be ISO C# language is wonderful to work in. The cloning of the full .Net system may be entirely successful, or some substitutions may be required for legal reasons.
Either way will be okay with me. Yes, I'd like to be able to run unmodified Windows apps on Linux, but there will be enough local platform (P/Inovoke) stuff used in most major GUI apps that binary portability won't be likely anyway.
It doesn't have to be like Java: obsessively the same -- at the binary level -- regardless of the costs.
A little bit of porting work in exchange for access to some local platform features and potentially a better end product -- I'll take that tradeoff.
I think Mono will provide it, regardless of what MS does.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Partially correct. But you forget that the problem may not be the .NET itself and Mono or Microsoft's implementations... By itself, .NET looks inoccent and simple, implementators may feel secure for its children. However .NET is usually looked as an all-whole integration of local and network apps also. And I believe that the real trouble will happen when, libraries established and servers running, some people start creating .NET apps. Then, with all this loosy ideology and global interactivity, bugs and back-doors will pop-up. Frankly, I believe that .NET will be more important as a transportation system. To bring up the beef to the customer. When he bites it, the .NET apps will just help bring him the delicious smell of rotten meat and do everything so that he doesn't forget for that smell for months.
Well at least pure C# software will most likely not have buffer overrun weaknesses. I for one think it's time to build this into the programming languages and compilers instead of relying on programmer's discipline. So languages like C#, Java, Object Pascal (...) are the way to go!
So exactly is the part of .NET that you think makes it more prone to exploits than C and Java again?
.NET to everything else. That's the loose cannon.
.NET, in a near future, you may really risk not only to format something but also get "Now all your data belong to us". Java does not have such a deep interaction to other aplications or libraries as .NET. In fact, it is pretty isolated in its environment, interacting with databases and other stuff through tons of interfaces. On .NET, this frontier dissolves nearly to the impossible. Even if there are guidlines, even if the CLI is supposed to have all the security it can, even if these GTK# and VBs will have their own library infrastructure, separated from its classical GTK+ or VisualBasic DLLs, it will be impossible to get a guaranteed security. Generally, security is inversly proportional to flexibility. The more flexible you do an app, the less secure it is. This is not a strict law. But here, we are talking about something that allows several programming languages to interact. And programming languages mean nothing less than several tons of different ways to program algorithms. And algorithms can have lots of interesting problems, depending on the language they are programmed.Yes there is some animal called Common Language Infrastructure, but can you really care that this thing is strict enough to hold the security tight? I don't think so. I cannot believe that someone can manage to write in C# the same way one does in Basic. Besides why we would need so many linguages in this thing? Frankly if anyone will try to restrict the linguistics of this thing, we will end up with a Java-alike language that can just be spoken in many dialects. And I am sure that this is not the intention of the original creators of .NET. They want something like a Babylon machine, capable of understanding everyone and serve everything. This is what makes me believe, that in the future we will see that .NET, its libraries and servers are not so innocent as they look now.
.NET I may see things quite to similar to Java and its world. However the loose interactivity of this thing breaks the shell of security like the one Java possesses.
.NET communication infrastructure. A small piece of code breaks the security, calls some central node for apps/control and actively uses the victim computer for its nefarious activities. Naivety? Let's wait and see.
The part that is related to interacting
Any Java standard application that you run using "java" can format your harddisk.
You may call me ignorant, jerk or whatever. But you just don't launch "java" by loading an applet in your browser right? And the thing cannot format you HDD just like that because its infrastructure does not allow to directly interact with your machine without your knowledge. With
Java is exploitable and we all know about that. However to create real exploits, one has to dig up inside the forest of its virtual machine and interfaces. To reach an exploitable zone, one has to calculate several moments, from the interface level down to the zone where JVM acts with the real machine. Being an enclosed environment, Java makes this a lot too difficult to be done. On
Frankly I wouldn't be admired to see a new type of exploit - the worm tunnels, systems that break into a computer and create a more active and permanent presence in it, by using the
Impossible pal. The problem of buffer overflows is related not only to the programming language itself but also the the architecture you run the programs on. Intel, AMDs and alikes are prone to buffer overflows because they do not make strict distinctions between code and data. While one works in such architectures, the potential of exploits is always above zero.
.NET is more deeply integrated to other systems and environments than Java. At least I don't see those same strict barriers that would block java application environments, from using C/C++ library functions or vice-versa. In any case, the .NET infrastructure is much more loosy in this. Now C is simply and generally assembler for humans. In fact, it is the bottom line of the architecture you work with. C++ is just a more complex frame, but is is not so far from C. Saying that there is nothing dangerous in this interaction, is not only stupid but irresponsible.
C#, like Java, may not be so prone to buffer overruns while they remain in a certain virtual architecture that avoids many of the weaknesses of the real processors. However,
ASP != ASP.NET
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Rubbish. I can't speak about the java/network security half of that comparison, but the main problem with C as a network programming language is the potential for buffer overrun exploits. Environments like Java, Python and
You don't have the foggiest clue what you are talking about.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
the IID->interface mapping is needed by cross-apartment marshalling. when marshalling/unmarshalling an interface in the channel COM needs to locate the proxy/stub code for that interface. the mechanism for doing this involves a registry lookup.
I really don't understand this. I'm not a biassed fight tooth and nail OSS freak but this stuff seems just soooo lame. .Net thing seems to me more like a joke than anything else. I know NOBODY exept one (and check they Site to see they can't even do valid HTML -> www.q-in-media.de ) in the industry actually using it - but then again that might be a different story in the US. So at least M$ wants us across the pond to believe.
ASP sucks. Period. It has sucked, it sux and it probably allways will suck. This
It costs a zillion Euros, isn't even plattformindependent and, well ok, Mono is it's OSS counterpart and probably gonna be something usefull in the future. But what is the big deal?
Understand me:
I'm currently doing a little Python project. Python seems to be a very cool PL. It's interpreted, OOP, GPLd, runs on just about anything that runs on electricity, has TKs for all major OSes and, shure enough, it works! And it cost me nada.
There's an OSS Appserver done with it called Zope that comes with a Webinterface for all your servicing needs, sort of installs in 2 minutes on any given OS (4 minutes if you're of the not-so-savy type) and suits 99% of all Inet related Tasks that you might ever want to do.
Anything else I can get Java and a zillion OSS things, from JBoss to Cocoon, for it or I pick C++ for speed in 3D and grafical stuff.
Now once again I ask: Please someone tell me what's the big deal of all this crap?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This guy is 100% correct.
.NET/Mono, Microsoft turns around a sues them for royalties.
I talked to my high school buddy who was a patent attorney, but who quit the business because he hated the whole business of IP law because he was morally against it.
I asked him what could happen, and theoretically, depending on the strength of the patents, Microsoft could sit back and wait for Mono to be developed, wait until a critical mass of applications gets developed on it, and then start charging royalties to anyone using that technology.
Unless someone clarifies the legal status of Mono in regards to Microsoft's patents, this is 100% definitely the situation that will occur.
Think about it, it is exactly what Rambus tried to do with SDRAM. Microsoft is a business and looks to Linux as a major threat. It is a jackpot for Microsoft in two ways:
1) They get the Open Source schmucks to do their work for them
2) Once a bunch of businesses have implemented their business on
We need to get a legal clarification of Mono before any real development starts occuring. My guess is that it is stepping on a whole shitload of Microsoft patents, and it is the onus of the implementors (ie. Ximian) to make sure that they develop around those patents, or 1) be prepared to try to quash the patents or 2) pay whatever royalties Microsoft charges.
The mono project is very exciting. I'm looking forward to installing ASP.NET on Slackware and see how well my existing apps port over. My .NET user group will certainly do some open source projects on the platform and demonstrate how well (or not) it works.
.NET "clone" if you will, for the Linux platform. It's doubtful that lawsuits / litigation will arise because C#/CLI is an open standard (ECMA). However, after recently speaking at a Linux user group on .NET many were very frightened that MS might have something up their sleeves. I guess only time will tell.
One thing that really excites me is that Mono could be sort of a "bridge" of technology. It can bring Windows developers to linux, and linux developers to windows. And no worry about the platform. Of course, Java attempted to do this, but lawsuits prevented it from really going forward on the Windows platform (couple that with the marketing machine). Now we have the "reverse" situation that we had 5 years ago. Mono is attempting to produce a
You are right of course, the underlying architecture itself is still very much vulnerable (on all platforms). But at least those languages make it hard for application developers to create weaknesses like that. Of course it remains to be seen where most exploits will come from, but (taking Java and Delphi as an example and comparing it to C++ apps) I think that most mistakes are made by application developers and that infrastructure code on the other hand (like compilers or protocol stuff) is more thoroughly tested in that respect.
.NET executables by taking one of the most often exploited weaknesses of traditional compiled apps into account. What's true for Java is also true for "pure" .NET apps.
Saying that there is nothing dangerous in this interaction, is not only stupid but irresponsible.
I never said there is nothing dangerous in tight integration like that. I just wanted to make a comment on the security of
A very succinct explanation I got while on a .NET training course was that .NET reversed something that Microsoft got wrong:
COM: A very lightweight wrapper for intra-machine communication. Low overhead and fast. Forces programmer to handle all other issues like memory management, implementing interfaces etc. etc.
COM+: A heavyweight framework for inter-machine (remote) execution. Tries to do all things and as such suffers from being ghastly to set up and use
In short
COM: Light for local machine execution
COM+: Heavy for remote execution
Microsoft decided they got this completely wrong and have reversed it
dotNET local machine: Uses a CLR and common type system. This handles all memory management etc. etc. inside a virtual machine making things easy for the coder (with overhead of course)
dotNET remoting: Has become very lightweight. You just send XML soap messages over TCP. That's light and that's also what web services are based on. Can you imagine even considering web servicse with COM+ ?
So that's what they've changed in terms of COM/COM+. Having used it, I'm glad I never have to touch COM+ again and I'm glad that Microsoft have realised that a java style CLR/VM works well for general programming
*shrug* you started out discussing (in a loose sense of the word) C libraries etc. Go read what you posted. I did, just to check. What I brought up is buffer overruns, as I think it's a most important security topic. Of course you seem to think that the equivalence of code and data is *far* more important. Why? BTW, can you name one major recent exploit in software in the wild that involved this 'flaw' in processor architecture but was not a buffer overrun fo some kind?
C, Basic, Java or even
Well, here's the thing. AFAIK, buffer overruns happen a lot in C programs but very seldom if ever in Java, python or
And while we are at it, do you feel that the presnece of mere JNI makes Java as insecure as C? Bear in mind that unmanaged
Can you comment on how the
Or not, as you don't seem to be making any coherent points anyway.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
From a technical perspective, .NET might be a very nice platform. I'm certaining hearing that it is. The speed with which the Mono team formed and started executing was impressive.
.NET. Mono copies that design. If Microsoft's patents were not enough to stop people using .NET apps on non-MS platforms, all MS has to do is CHANGE THE DESIGN.
.NET apps will be TRULY portable, something MS DOES NOT WANT because it makes their platform inconsequential. In fact, if they did not defend their platform, this would be the death of MS.
People, you need to wake up. Stop being technophiles and think. This is Microsoft we are talking about here. They do NOTHING for the benefit of their customers. They do EVERYTHING to gain market share and ensure the domination of their operating system.
MS is playing "nice" now by not serving legal injunctions based on their patents. Will they continue?
Let's say some of the people that reply to this post say "The patents are irrelevant blah blah blah blah". OK, fine. Let's say they are. That doesn't even matter, here's why:
MS defines
Remember when OS/2 had win32s compatibility? Remember Microsoft's response? IBM took the win32s distribution from MS and binary mapped it into a valid set of OS/2 libraries and programs. Within a very short period of time, MS released a NEW VERSION OF WIN32S TO BREAK IBM'S USE. Analysis at the time showed that the changes, which were few, were gratuitous and the only conclusion was as I've stated it. I did some googling and this is a good summary.
If Mono is too successful, this will happen again. "Too successful" means that
Let me put it another way:
Microsoft is enabling, for the first time in their history, users to write portable programs and that portability could kill or severely damage Microsoft. Microsoft knows that they will be able to prevent this, if need be, and they will only show that card if they need to. After all, no need to give the conspiracy theorists ammo, right?
Is it not going to be open source as you are not allowing people to contribute openly?
"Release early, release often" does not mean release the product of one day of planning. Good free software projects start with the cathedral model, with only one or a few engineers working on the thing. Then, once there's enough architecture in place to sustain the beginnings of a bazaar, the developers produce a first milestone release.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You just don't take the point. We are talking here about corrots and apples. Your ideas and considerations are purely based on the fact that you ignore the fact that code is all equal for machines. You make such remarkable distinctions between languages but forget that the machine, doesn't give a Hell if you write in C or Java. C, Java and most languages are not insecure by themselves. There is nothing in C to make you automatically fall into buffer overflows. It is the way the machine processes the code and data that creates it.
.NET, the code would be quite full-proof. Correct. But does anyone think that 99% of developers would be able to do that? Without an HOWTO-MAKE-SECURE-.NET-APPS-FOR-REAL-DUMMIES we will see sure trouble arounf here. Besides, even if that HOWTO existed, 90% of the people would not give a dman about it.
.NET and its interaction with the most raw of all things - the binary code.
And remember. C is just human macro-assembler. You can make even more pretty buffer overflows in Assembler or machine code.
Your opinion for the irrelevance of the real machine is not perfectly correct. First note the overblow of putting a virtual machine over the real one. Second, the insecurity of the real machine remains at the same level. The problem of security in Java is that is quite difficult to go all the way down to explore something in the border between JVM and the host machine.
The use of JNI does weak Java security. Frankly this could rise serious problems in the future. But comparing it to C is something I wouldn't risk to do. C code, done the right way, can be a lot more secure than any Java code. I have seen such pieces of code. Gigantic marvels where speed is combined to nearly military security. However it costs a lot more to create such code than using Java. Choosing each of the ways depends highly on the priorities, guarantees and needs you have for the code. Claiming that one piece of code is far better than other, here, is very difficult.
Here one may ask. But if one combines real ironmade C with
And, once again, if you read me well you may see that I don't give a Hell to C libraries.The problem is on the freedom to code
If you let a trademark get diluted in the marketplace, your claim to that trademark grows weaker, or even goes away entirely. Patents don't work like that.
It works for patents as well, just not as strongly. Look up the laches doctrine and see how it applies to patent infringement lawsuits. Quick summary (IANAL): If Alice harms Bob in delaying legal action for an infringement, then Alice loses the right to collect damages for infringements that happened before she filed the lawsuit.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You obviously don't get the point that this Mono initiative is Open Source. .Net and C# are open standards now, Microsoft released it out into the wild. I am not sure if Microsoft hired this guy just to create C# or whether he works as MS full-time, but the creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi also created C#. It isn't a replacement for C/C++, but instead it serves it's own purpose, and quite well I might add. It is very easy and intuitive to base business components on the .Net structure because that's what it was designed to do from the ground up. I might be a little more leary if Microsoft had never opened up the language to the public to use kind of like Sun with Java. Be open minded about it and take a look at mono, I think you'll be very surprised.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
While you're description is very accurate, your assuming the person knows what the COM+ framework J2EE, BEA, Runtime Layers, Frameworks, and Web Services are...
.NET is basically a Java clone. Like Java, .NET runs all of it's programs in a virtual machine. Unlike Java, you can write .NET programs in 20 programming languages (now including Java). All of these languages can talk to each other pretty seamlessly. .NET also has a lot of new tools to make your programs connecting/communicating with other programs on the net a lot easier using a technology called SOAP.
To put it simply and all semantics aside,
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
You allude to Java needing a standards process - have you read or looked at any of the Java Community Process stuff? What is your problem with a system that lets companies and individuals besides Sun propose and comment on enhancements and additions to Java?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is it just me, or were the comments in this story like getting a free interview from Miguel on the .NET/Mono topic? :)
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Just so people know, there's been much concern that the CLS will take languages that are paradigmatically different from the C/C++/C# family of langauges (like Haskell, which is a functional language) and strip away the syntax that makes them powerful in their own way (closures, continuations) until they're basically C/C++/C#, differing in syntax only.
At which point, the CLS would no longer be a good thing.
Where do you get the idea that a licence can be revoked at any time? They can stop granting the licence freely to anyone, but for those who have relied on having it already will have a very strong "explicit permission" defense.
:-] ) is going to fail to produce the exact page they displayed when asked for it. The words "obstruction of justice" do have an impact on corporations.
As for "your word against theirs", that is true and courts are very good at looking at the available evidence to figure out who to believe. In this case they published on the internet which means that 1) neutral 3rd parties witnessed it and 2) it's probably in an archive and/or cache somewhere and 3) the person taking advantage of the grant may have a verifiable record
Under these circumstances, during discovery, no corporation (except maybe Arther Anderson
I believe it would take me about a day to implement the main ideas of COM on Linux.
The only hard part is marshalling.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
You will be glad to know that we are busily working on a version of Gnome2, but since Gnome2 is very good on its own, we wanted to make sure that there was a reason for people to upgrade to Ximian's version, so we are spending quite some time in addressing the needs from our users.
;-)
The wait will be worth it. I can not talk about release dates. I can tell you that a number of previews has been sent to alpha testers for evaluation, and we will have to incorporate their feedback before we are ready to release the new version.
Now the right person to talk about these things is Nat Friedman who is in charge of the desktop work. He has quite a few new tricks for the new release, but I wont spoil his debuting new desktop here
miguel.
Very misleading article title. The web server is nothing more than a very basic and somewhat broken web server used to test ASP.NET classes. While it can serve ASP.NET pages I wouldn't say they have shipped a server.
'Same speed C but faster'
It's an infrastructure, and a very closed one -- ideas of its creators are imposed on the design and can not be changed. If successful, it captures not just software, it takes the area in the noosphere and pollutes (or improves) the process of thinking of all developers that go into that area. This is a kind of work that absolutely can not be developed by anything with commercial interest in mind and end up useful -- examples for that are legion -- PL/1 vs. C, STREAMS vs. BSD Sockets, RPC vs. socket-based protocols with protocol-specific parsing, Motif vs. GTK, H.323 vs. SIP, MPEG audio vs. Vorbis, and I hope, SQL will be next to go. In all cases except PL/1 later there was an open or semi-open implementation of bad standard, and it ended up being absolutely useless for any purpose other than to drag bad code into good systems, thus delaying the development of better one.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"PHP is much better for working with various aspects of the network, Operating System and even other languages. PHP is to ASP as a remote controlled car using standard parts is to a Radio Shack special that welds and glues all the proprietary parts together... that and it only turns in reverse and only a right hand turn at that. YAY!"
PHP is much better than ASP.
ASP.NET is much better than PHP.
Hopefully that helps you gain some perspective on what's being discussed here.
It's a tad late to get into this discussion now, but I'll add this thought (tired as I am):
Microsoft doesn't care about Mono as a competitor; in fact, I'm pretty sure that, internal to Microsoft, Mono is seen as a Good Thing.
Because it is another Java killer.
Sun has dropped the ball on Linux Java so many times and in so many ways. Slow implementations, poor visual quality, and a general attitude of "okay, we did Linux, so quitcher bitchin'".
I've developed large apps in both Java and .Net; in my experience, Java is the more comprehensive and stable option. But Java suffers from poor implementation beyond Sun's favored Windows and Solaris platforms. Mac Java is always one generation behind; Linux Java is rough at best.
The entire point of Java is portability -- the quality of the Java experience is directly tied to the quality of the Java implementation for a given platform.
Now enter Microsoft, which has been limited to the world of Windows. Until now, Java could boldly claim the high moral ground of portability (albeit a dubious claim; in fact, Java is "Write once, test everywhere.").
But if a reliable, free version of .Net is available for Linux and other platforms, Java suddenly loses one of its reasons to live. Why develop in unreliable Java when you can write a portable app in .Net?
Microsoft has every reason to support Mono's success -- because, in the end, it legitimizes their new "platform" at the expense of Sun's Java.
I'll bet Gates has a copy of The Prince (by Machiavelli) on his shelf.
All about me
It's a great language to work in. If MS makes it impossible to have a full .Net clone, I would still be delighted to have a good ISO C# compiler (even a native compiler), a runtime (which could just be a library that links to native code, like the GC libraries for C++), the subset of libraries included in ISO CLI, GTK# for GUIs, and whatever other libraries the OSS community develops for various useful things (like CPAN, but for Mono).
In fact, if MS starts suing people to prevent them from implementing an ISO standard, the ISO committee would lean strongly toward making this OSS alternative the basis for the next version of the ISO standard.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
ISO will take a dim view of MS suing people to prevent implementations of an ISO standard. If MS sues anyway, the OSS community will create alternatives that ISO would take very seriously as the basis for the next version of the standard. MS doesn't control the votes of the national representatives on the ISO committee, nor does an ISO standard control MS, but there are powerful commercial incentives for MS to avoid losing control.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Microsoft claims that the CLR bytecode is designd for JIT. Java bytecode was definately originally designed to maximize portability of interpreters (as in there are JVMs for 8-bit microprocessors and 64-bit "big iron") rather than for optimal recompilation to native code.
To what extent is this true? Please tell us about features in the bytecode or the class file format that are optimized for efficient recompilation on the fly. I've read Ken Thompson's paper at Bell labs about the design of the DIS virtual machine. It would seem that a stack-based virtual machine is much less suitable for JITs than a memory based virtual machine. Cam you refute this, particualrly on non-register-starved platforms (PPC, ARM, Itanium)? Granted, memory machines much more complicated in concept than stack machines. However,for optimum register allocation in the native code, you need to basiclly undo the stack machine's register allocation (to two GP registers, the top of the stack) before doing register allocation, while memory machine bytecode is basically ready for register allocation with little preprocessing.
You must have some gripes about MSs VM design. What are the main ones? What about the VM imposing C#s object model at the "hardware" level instead of using constructs written in bytecode and using privledged VM modes (analogous to privledged CPU instructions on a real machine, but perhaps much higher-level instructions) to enforce security restrictions? (This seems to be one of the main gripes of enthusiasts of non-ALGOL-descended languages on the .NET platform.)
While you're at it, can you point to features that indicate MS really wanted a VM that worked elegantly with languages very unlike C#? I've heard that a main deterant to Stackless patches being merged into the main Python distribution is the changes necessary are very ugly to do in the JVM and would probably cause a major split with the Jython people. Would it be easy to get efficient handling of tail-recursion and efficient implementations of Stackless Python? How badlymangled internally are Perl.NET and Python.NET?
Thanks for all of your hard work, and good luck in the future.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
What I ment was: .NET.
;)): 2 months ago I was hired to help with a project that was about an intranet application build with .NET. It had to have print functionality, for letters, generated with data from the application. How to print the letters with templates that can easily be changed by the customer? We choose for word, since it has a COM interface. Now we managed to build .NET code which instantiated word on another machine which was the letter machine (old win32 box with a dedicated printer for this) and which was able to generate the letter on that machine from the intranet webapp. Now, if the webapp was moved to Mono, it will fail, since mono doesn't support the instantiating of COM objects on other machines. And believe me, allthough word is heavy for this usage, a lot of intranet applications use it for printing and generating letters. This is just 1 example of using a COM object on another machine in a .NET application, but I'm sure there are more. Mono will not support these structures. True, it would be great to just keep everything 100% .NET code so the transfer to mono would be free of pain, but in the real world this is hardly the case. At least for some time.
Windows (the server variants) are designed to be application / functionality servers, that is: they provide functionality to others, be it clients or other servers. Now, when you have functionality build into com objects, you can now instantiate, as you know, that object from another server, by using DCOM. You can use this same functionality from
When is this useful? Well, f.e. in the following scenario (don't bug on my that its a sucking solution, I didn't cook it up
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
What difference would it make if they publically stated something? PR releases aren't necessarily legally binding. And look who you're dealing with...
This would explain why Microsoft are not actively combating 'Mono'. Why fight what you can co-opt? MS are not stupid. They have these guys doing their work for them, and they don't even have to pay 'em. Why stop them?
-1 Fanciful
Dotnet is not an open standard, only C# and the CLR, comprising approx 120 classes out of 1200 in Dotnet, are standardized.
I agree with your sentiment. But at least saying things out loud might discourage them beforehand and shame them afterwards. I am not implying that these people have any sense of shame however.
War is necrophilia.