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Ars Technica Tours Mono
Kevin Francis writes "Over the coming weeks, Ars Technica will be taking a look at Mono, including a basic introduction to Mono, MonoDevelop, and C#, and then branching out to GTK#, database access, ASP.NET, advanced C# topics, and conclude with a discussion of the future of Mono, and the C# standard. All the examples will work on Windows and Linux, with OSX support coming shortly. Part 1 of the series is online now."
Clearly one of the biggest concerns is the degree of compatability between .NET and Mono & the lack of many of the API's that exist on Windows - which face it will be the primary development environment.
.NET beyond the standards thus marginalising Mono, but i'm sceptical of whether this will happen - it's in their interests to keep the core platform and language specs consistent, the API's are another matter...
I'm sure someone will point out that MS will extend
Time for coders to take a closer look!
:)
What are the methods currently used by GIMP, OpenOffice, Mozilla among others that already support multiple OS's?
Maybe Ill start learning coding with this and kill more birds with the same shot
What mono needs is a good RAD tool for developing GTK# based apps. I know you can reference GTK# libraries in VS.NET but there's no support for cross platform forms design.
The syntax for building Winforms is completely different to GTK# (as one might expect) but the documentation I've found doesn't really map types and methods for developers familiar with existing RAD tools such as MonoDevelop and the excellent SharpDevelop.
Tool designer support for GTK# is crucial.
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I am writing an app for mono that is supposed to run on linux mac and windows in the end. From what I see it's nowhere near just starting a .NET app on linux using mono.
The app clearly has to be written with crossplatform execution in mind. (I know this goes for c and java too, but some people seem to think they will run office on mono in the future.).
You need to steer clear of anything that depends on a platform.
- if you define a path, make sure you use path.combine or path.directoryseparatorchar instead of a / of \.
- don't depend on environment variables
- pay attention to casing, don't say "file.ext" when it's "File.ext"
I know it should be ovbious to any cross platform dev out there, but I just thought I'd bust some bubbles with some of the less informed.
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I certainly am. I am required to use C# in a Windows environment, and since I've discovered mono for my at-home-just-for-fun stuff, I'm able to leverage the experience and education from my day job. I find myself doing far more of this for-fun work in the linux environment now. For me, this has been the greatest boon of having mono, and hopefully other developers forced to work in Windows will also leverage mono to bring even more great software to other platforms.
Uninformed slashdotters with tin foil hats should click this link. .NET, Rotor and Mono are implementations.)
ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure (of which
Novell is banking on making Windows->Linux migrations simple as a selling point for their tools. Providing a viable supported .net platform is a key. Do I think that this will become the de facto Linux dev kit? No. Too many users love their kit of choice (perl,pythong,java,etc) and in any case the open source community abhors being told how to develop. Nonetheless having one more option is a benefit. The only downside is potential bloat of distro CDs, but hey we crossed this line a long time ago and its what you have to do if you want to support N dev toolkits.
I mean, take Python! (my favorite high level cross-platform programming languate)
- Python has been around longer than Java (it's from 1991)
- Python has been ported to a lot more platforms than Java (and certainly
.NET!)
- Python has various powerful language features that Java, C# can only dream of (metaclasses, generators, list comprehensions)
- Pure python programs will run everywhere a suitable Python is available
What's so special about Java orIt will be a sad say indeed when developers are tied to a specific language for a specific platform just because that is what someone has mandated from on high.
I look forward to the legal and security issues with .NET, Mono and .GNU. We live in interesting times.
Stick Men
The Mono project was conceived in the Summer of 2001 as an Open Source alternative to Microsoft's .NET development platform. Since then, it has come all the way to a 1.0 release among a flurry of controversy from mostly inside the Open Source community itself. Although we will not outline the reasons here, most of the criticism stems from the fact that .NET is Microsoft, and "we" don't like them.
.Net are not satisfactorily answered. What about MS total control of the standard? What good will the standard be if the company that owns 95% of the desktop starts shipping a .Net that deviates from the standard? What about the parts of .Net that are not covered by the the standard, and in fact have intellectual property encomberances?
.Net is essentially the Java runtime environment, with MS additions. Why is .Net any better than Java for application development. Is its speed any better? Is Mono's speed any better than Java's?
What a stupid simplification!! There are legitimate concerns over how MS exerts it monopoly power, and many of the resultant concerns with Mono and its support of MS'
Mono's main pull for developers is that it is cross-platform and makes writing applications very fast because of its extensive framework. Mono also has the concept of garbage collection. Gone are the days of using malloc() and free() and recording where you allocated memory and making sure you free() it. Java has GC as well, but Java never really caught on as an application language.
Another biased statement; has C# caught on as an application language? Why not point out that C# is pretty close to a clone of the Java language, and that
I don't mind a review of Mono. I was interested in reading it, and would like to know more about it. But, when the author so casually dismisses the concerns with MS and Mono, or dismisses the legitimacy of Java, I question his objectivity.
And, of course, there's the fact that his latter two complaints are kind of sort of fixed in 1.5.
:-)
:-)
So...
Personally, I think the C# folks make too much of a big deal about the mandatory exception handling in Java. Heard a fellow from Microsoft say "Frequently, Java folks just put an empty catch() block to catch the exception they know won't happen, so why make it mandatory?"
I've got bad news for you. I find situations like that about once a week when auditing my programmers' code, and it's almost always a situation that -can- happen, but the programmer couldn't see it.
Don't trust the programmer. I know, I am one.
I've already been doing this sort of cross-platform programming for years with wxWidgets/wxPython. I'm not waiting on Mac support - I'm already using it (and improving it!). What amazes me is that the authors act like Mono is breaking new ground by having a portable programming language that can do GUIs but is easier than Java. Hello? Apparently no one ever told them about Python/wxPython?
.NET experience comes from using Windows. And as the Ars Technica article shows, it's going to be a while before anyone can really write sophisticated cross-platform GUI apps using this toolkit. (And will it be GTK# on Mac? Does that mean X11 is needed there? Ugh.)
;-)
And not only can I use it today, I get better results than I would with GTK# or Java in terms of cross-platform interfaces. If you've ever seen the GIMP on Windows, you'd know that GTK apps don't quite look like professional Windows apps. Emulated interfaces will always look out of place, particularly as themes get more common.
I'd encourage anyone who is interested in cross-platform programming to download Python and wxPython, then run the wxPython demo on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and then explain to me exactly how it is that Mono is breaking new ground. (Note also that the wxPython 2.5.2 release on Mac will sport a number of nice improvements and is due out soon.)
The only new and unique thing that I see about Mono is that it uses and is compatible with APIs designed by Microsoft. As a compatibility layer, that has some value, but they will always be two steps behind Microsoft and MS will always ensure that the best
Anyways, time to go back to making my native, cross-platform apps.
I'll bite, even though you're an AC. You must understand that everything evolves in the computer world. We do not simply make new things up. The tools available at our disposal are the result of an evolutionary process that has gone on for 50+ years.
.NET is most certainly not any of those things you presented. .NET is the new version of Win32, which we all know, as a subsystem to a pretty amazing kernel (nt/2k/xp), really drags the entire system down. You should be excited that Linux is getting in on the ground floor of a fresh, robust, and USEFUL framework so early in the game. Heck, how many Windows apps are written in .NET right now? How many will be in 5-10 years? Exactly. How many years did it take to wean people from Win16? I can tell you that I still have a couple of apps that haven't migrated, and that it took a LOT of other apps more than 3-4 years after Windows 95 was released to make the switch.
.NET on both sides of the coin (hey, you'll soon even be able to throw OSX in there too), and in three or four years, when someone says: "I can't switch from Windows, because app X won't work, or is too slow through Wine," or blah, blah, blah, you'll be able to retort that all of their favorite apps will run natively on Linux or OSX, thus freeing them from any sort of platform dependence.
.NET is a great tool. C# really does allow some very neat and timesaving features for development. That's the number one reason more people don't develop for Linux/Unix. Some people are too young to remember WHY we left Unix on the big-iron all those years ago, but if we insist on repeating those mistakes, let's at least provide an evironment that can muster some developer support. Not everyone is writing a Word/Excel/Photoshop. Some people like to site down and bang out a few lines of code, and be confident that it'll work as intended, where intended. VB has gone a long way toward keeping the Mom & Pop development shops on Windows. If we can begin to get these folks to consider making cross-platform apps, then half the battle will be over. Now we just need to convince the users of those apps that there are advantages to running them on Linux. Better hurry before Longhorn comes out, too... That may set OSS back 10 years or more, but at least MS has given us an extra three years to innovate in the meantime!
That being said,
The lesson? MS is going to win, because they have the advantage, at least on the desktop. Paradigm shifts (unix->dos->windows->linux) don't happen very often, and you need a lot of geurilla tactics to even have a fighting chance. The best thing I can see is to support
As an added bonus,
First off, realize that I'm not anti-Linux. I've used Linux both professionally and at home. UNIX, too. And I also know C++ and C#, among other languages.
.net, C#, and okay Java too, is that they're essentially playing catch-up to what's already out there. People who've only used C++, and the people who can't shake the "everything has to be optimized down to the last microsecond" mindset, tend to really like C# and .net. After all, now they finally have real modules, a clean string syntax, hidden memory management, and so on. Just that the article makes a big deal about the power of this line:
.net and C# appear to be coming from people who spent the nineties thinking that C++ was the pinnacle of software development. If you look at Perl and Python, though, they still have lots of wins, like no noticible compile times, no need to jam everything into an object framework, less bulky syntax, a lot less fussing about types, and generally more malleable ways of programming. From that point of view, C# doesn't offer much, unless again you stay up late worrying about shaving cycles out of your button handler callbacks.
.net and C# are what they came up with, a solution that's still far behind what was already available. A solution that feels like something that would have been stunning in 1990 or 1992, but now is mired in an earlier generation of software development. The weird part is that dragging this over to Linux, making it an across the board cross-platform solution, is looked at as a good thing. The effort would be better spent elsewhere, like coming up with a lighter weight GUI toolkit for Python that breaks from Tk and behemoths like WxWindows.
What has always struck me about
bool matches = Regex.IsMatch( input, regex );
is telling. After all, you could do this--with a cleaner syntax, mind you--in Perl fifteen years ago. Don't like Perl? Well, Python then. Or even old clunky TCL. And so to me, the furor over
Perl and Python have always been better supported under Linux than Windows, and I'd even call them the Linux way of approaching software development. Leverage the best tools available so you can achieve more in less time. Microsoft has been playing catch-up here, and
Right. Of course that's all about to change - from the Java 1.5 ("5") new features site:
You still need to deal with exceptions - that's a bad thing?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
While an interesting (if very simple) article, it never adresses the elephant in the room - why not Java?
.NET lies in the ONE line of code:
With Java you can do everything in the example, with ease. From the article:
The great power of Mono and
bool matches = Regex.IsMatch( input, regex );
Wow! Well, in Java it looks like this:
boolean b = Pattern.matches(regex, input);
Is the great power of Mono then that they have screwed up the name of the matching method to FunnySound?
Or what about GTK support in Java - you could use Java-Gnome. Or you could use AWT. Or you could use Swing. Or you could use SWT if you prefer native performance.
And using all this, you don't have to wait for OS X support - it's here now! Chances are you don't have to wait for support on whatever OS you are using in fact, as the JVM is now pretty much everywhere.
So why ignore the elephant? Why does this article not go into the reasons why you would want to consider a platform years behind an exisitng one with similar capabilities, better cross-platform support, and way more tools. Instead it just pretends that corss-platform wasn't even possible before MONO.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Will they be concerned enough that Linux and OS X users are worthwhile supporting to make sure it is cross-platform?
Unlike Java, Mono doesn't try to shove cross-platform development down people's throats. If developers want to use Mono to develop Windows-specific applications, that's cool. If developers want to use Mono to develope Linux-specific applications, that's cool, too. If developers want to develop cross-platform applications with Mono, that's cool, too, and Mono supports that, too.
I suspect the biggest use of Mono will be the development of Linux desktop apps using Gnome/Gtk+. Many of those applications will be difficult to port over to Windows because they will rely on Linux-specific features. But that's no different from Gtk+ applications written in C or C++; Mono simply makes it easier to develop such applications by giving developers a choice of using C#.
The second biggest use of Mono will likely be the deployment of applications and libraries developed for Windows on Linux machines. Those applications were not originally written with cross-platform portability in mind, but by supporting Microsoft's APIs well enough, those applications will either work out of the box, or port over easily.
So, Mono gives the programmer the choice between writing cross-platform apps or taking advantage of platform-specific features. That's where the choice belongs, IMO.
I think the success of Java vs .NET will depend on how it is distributed and the "user experience" of installing and using .NET vs Java applications. Sun doesn't have the same level of control over the desktop experience that Microsoft has for desktop applications so that may be a deciding factor for most users.
On the server, Java is already very popular and installation/launching headaches are tolerated more because admins are willing to put in a little more effort than most users.
Other issues such as relative performance and the "look and feel" will also play a big role with users.
In the general theoretical sense, there isn't much difference between Java and .NET. The success of each will depend on the implementation.
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Yes, you have correctly tracked down the source of that misconception. It's an easy misconception to have, given what the Mono project writes about itself.
Now, dig down a little deeper and go to the downloads. What do you see? A "Mono Stack" on the left, consisting of OSS libraries and APIs, and a
Now, turn to the FAQ:
What does that tell you?
Why is the Mono project seemingly saying one thing and delivering another? Well, in part, it's because the term ".NET" is really ambiguous. In part, it's because where their money comes from and where their commercial interests are (they aren't doing this out of religion, they are in it for commercial purposes).
So, your confusion is understandable. I wish the Mono project were clearer on their front page, too, but I suspect they have reasons for what they are doing. Either way, you should really dig a little deeper.
No, Python is a SCRIPTING languate [sic].
No, it's a programming language. It's just productive enough for scripting. "Scripting language" doesn't really mean anything.
I would also add that the Java SDK supplies developers with FAR more common libraries than Python does which tends to cut development time.
Python libraries generally have better (simpler) design and are easier to use. And there are lots of them, both in the standard library and available separately.
Semantically, Java is a pure-OO language. Python is not.
It's exactly the other way around. Python is pure OO language, java is not. Does 'int' ring a bell for you? Python provides functions, but they are objects, just like ints, strings and, say, sockets.
Not that being pure OO language is the end-all and be-all. It just makes the language semantically cleaner while trading off some performance.
Opening a file in Python is a one liner. In Java you need 2 or more objects and 3+ lines of code. But you have much greater control over how the descripter is read.
You can have all the control you need, all the way down to file descriptor level. People just don't seem to need the control. Nothing prevents you from writing wrapper objects with different buffering policies.
Maybe because nobody has a mainstream cross platform app that is written in a scripting language?
Bittorrent? And quit with the "scripting language" term, it's ignorant or intellectually dishonest, take your pick.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
So instead of targetting the Windows platform, or the Linux platform, or the Java platform, I can now target the Mono platform, which has *GASP* a regular expression library.
Excuse me if I'm not a little underwhelmed by this. We're supposed to get excited about Mono because of the libraries? As if a good C or C++ coder couldn't write a regular expression parser in less than a week?
But no, I'm converting to Mono because (pick one or more):
I really don't see the big deal here, folks. The fact that the binaries are portable without recompile isn't going to make up for the fact that C++ is a mature, very powerful, fast, portable language.
Okay, if you've got counterexamples of the points above, I'd like to hear them. But save it if you're going to flame me for broiling your sacred cow. I'd rather see a few good reasons to switch from C++ than a flame war, and right now, Mono isn't making a compelling case. To me, it seems like its Yet Another Algebraic Language With Libraries.
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