Mono's Cocoa# Underway, GTK# Takes on Windows.Forms

Gentu writes "OSNews posted some exclusive screenshots of a new project in the Mono community: Cocoa#. Apparently there are a couple of Apple engineers helping out the project that allows developers to create graphical Cocoa applications under Mac OS X using the C#, Python or Basic language. Mono seems to be doing well in the Windows land too, allowing developers to use GTK# instead of Windows.Forms to create multi-platform apps."

Comments

Re:What exactly are you looking for?

[theantix]

uh, dude.

An interface is *so* much more than widgets and icons.

And I'm a Gnome zealot, for crying out loud.

dude.

Mono has come very far in a short period of time

[Ars-Fartsica]

Congrats to the Mono crew - from announcement to 1.0, they have covered a lot of ground in a short period of time and if they are perceived to be encumbered by patent issues (note I say perceived), they are not encumbered by bad-source-practices that is still keeping Java locked out of some domains.

You can use real apps right now with Gtk# - the Muine music player and the Blam RSS reader are functional and mostly stable...there are many other examples.

Re:For Linux?

[Amiga Lover]

I want Mac OS's interface on Linux! I've done what I consider to be as good of a job as I can, but it's not the best knock-off in the world.

They should be concentrating on making quick & efficient UIs like the Amiga had, or the early Macs, not bloat upon bloat upon bloat.

Both the original mac and Amiga UI systems fit inside 512k RAM or less, leaving everything else for the App's functionality. When some of those early machines were expanded from 68000 CPUs to 68040s and 32MB of ram or more they flew faster than any 2 or 3GHz cpu in GUI feel. Nothing could outclass them

So why do we need this bloat?

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[jcr]

Objective-C has some serious flaws. ..and also some compelling advantages. Take a look at how NSUndoManager was implemented, and please tell me how to do the same thing in Java, C#, C++ or whatever your favorite language may be.

-jcr

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Osty]

Why the obsession with Microsoft technology?

.NET is pretty damned good, and people recognize that. The few who don't are the normal "Anything but Microsoft" zealots. It's not perfect, but very good and getting better.

What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer?

Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.

Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product?

.NET is the hot new buzzword, and your VPs aren't smart enough to realize that it's not suitable for embedded realtime applications.

Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.

From your perspective, that may be true, but then you're looking at the world from the eyes of a real-time, embedded systems developer where you work with a limited set of known hardware under strict time and resource constraints. .NET isn't for you. That doesn't mean the world has actually gone mad, just that there's more to the world than that which applies to you.

Re:you have got to be joking

[The Infamous Grimace]

Yeah, I used to use a MS Intellipoint Optical Wheelmouse with my 2 macs, still use it on one. However, for my old laptop I've gone back to the ol' one-button. Why? I've decided that the original paradigm is better; the keyboard has far more functionality than any mouse, with the exception of the scroll wheel.

In Safari, if you want to open a link in another tab, just command-click. In another window? Alt-command-click. Want a menu? Ctrl-click.

For dealing with files, open 2 finder windows in column view, and stack them on the screen. Want to cut-n-paste? Drag-n-drop. Want to copy? Alt drag-n-drop. Want a shortcut? Alt-command drag-n-drop.

The more I use a one-button mouse, the more I like it. YMMV.

(tig)

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it this way.

For years, developers targetting the windows platform had two (real) choices VB or C/C++.

With C/C++ you had two choices. Use the win32 API directly and/or use MFC. With VB, creation of GUI apps was made as simple as possible, at the expense of a cumbersome language.

Throw COM into the mix, complex threading models and API interface du-jour and the bottom line is that Windows developers have been guinea pigs feeding on inconsistent standards for 15 years.

-----Enter Java

Finally, a language that brings OOP to the masses without having to learn complex semantics regarding memory allocation. It also eliminates the cumbersome and overly complex nature of STL in C++.

The drawbacks were twofold: Early java adopters didn't have the rich GUI IDE's present in VB5/6 and VC++/DevStudio. Like it or not, it hurt producitivty, at least in the short term. Translation: corporate america didn't warm up to the idea immediately.

Another drawback to java was the rampant verbosity of the language. There are those that do believe that enum's and value types are GOOD things.

Then you had the immaturity of Java GUI toolkits that made 'rich client' apps look like they were written by high school script kiddies.

---- Enter .NET/C#

Goodbye VB6. Goodbye VC++. Hello managed code. Goodbye MFC. Hello (working) garbage collection. Goodbye complex threading models. Hello full-featured clone of Java.* renamed as System.*.

C# as a language is a dream. It contains most of the language features that I had been dying for. It is readable, quick to code in and is put together in a consistent manner.

There is very little about C# that is better than java. But for windows-based shops, Java can't hold a candle to c#/.net.

It isn't a religous war. You may not like microsoft's policies or busines practices. And they certainly didn't invent the concept of a managed environment or one-up Java.

While the typical slashdotter is foaming at the mouth about MS, .NET and how we are all bunch of idiots, I am busy writing code for a good company that just happens to base their operations on windows.

Imagine the ability to take an ASP.NET app that you RAD-developed using MS VS.NET tools and cross-compiling it in Mono, running the whole thing under apache using mod_mono.

You would have the benefit of a killer IDE (VS.NET), a rock-solid back end (Apache) and an application framework that works without headache!

That is why **I** use MS.NET and MONO. I don't particularly care for MS, but I am smart enough to know what side of the bread is buttered.

Bottom line: Sometimes you have to get past the religious zealotry of the pro-linux/anti-ms crowd (ie. slashdot) and see something for it's good.

This isn't a perfect world, and MS usually sucks, but .NET is cool. Linux is cool. Mono is cool.

Lets marry them together and reap the benefits.

Standing at the back of room pouting isn't helping advance your cause.

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[OmegaBlac]

What is it with the hatred for this man? I swear some you act like he is the anti-christ for what he is attempting to accomplish with the Mono project.

1. No one is forcing anyone to use Mono or run .Net apps on other operating systems.

2. Try to look at the advantages that the OSS and Linux communities can utilize here if we can convince more developers to develop apps for Linux due to the existance of Mono.

3. Mono and Miguel are not going anywhere so all the folks in the anti-mono crowd might as well get use to it.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[groomed]

Well, as the anonymous poster above already mentioned, you need to consider what came out of Microsoft before .NET; a confused jumble of acronyms and paradigms with the combined lifespan of a Coke bottle.

.NET really is Microsoft's first serious contribution to the computing culture (as opposed to industry) at large. It synthesises many of the ideas of the past decade in a very clean and logical way. And it's remarkably open: not in the sense that it's endorsed by some standards body, but in the sense that it actually makes an effort to integrate with other technologies -- through the pervasive use of XML, the Common Language Runtime and the numerous hooks in the class library, all the way down to the fact that the C# compiler will actually not explode when encountering a file with \n line termination rather than \r\n.

.NET is a heavy-duty framework that will be around in some form for decades to come, and it's pretty good. It's like Java but less insular, it's like C but less tedious.

What generates all the hubbub, of course, is that something like this is coming from Microsoft. Think of it as a celebration party. What's being celebrated is that Microsoft is finally coming of age.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Osty]

I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.

All I can offer is that C# and .NET are the current "cool" things, and thus Unix (read: Linux) developers don't want to be left out in the cold. That may change in the future. It may not. Mono may mature to the point where cross-platform .NET applications Just Work (tm) without ugly GTK# stuff (GTK# is fine for Linux, but GTK on Windows sucks, and I can't imagine GTK# would be any better -- besides, the look & feel is all off, and themes can only do so much to correct that).

Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?

Basically, ask yourself why you would use Java rather than C/C++/Qt/KDE/GTK/GNOME or a scripting language like Ruby or Python, and then realize that C# fixes many annoyances from Java (int is both Object-derived and a value type in C#, unlike int vs. Integer in Java; You can create user-defined value types in C#; C#'s generics implementation is much more robust than Java's syntactical sugar hack that translates everything to Object during compilation; etc) and adds new language features (attributes, properties, events, etc). Java and C# are garbage-collected, which makes them more secure by default than C/C++ (with respect to memory management issues, anyway -- you can certainly still write insecure code in Java or C#). They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode, .NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).

Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the .NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?

.NET fixes a number of shortcomings of Java. Also, the C# language and common runtime are truly open (ECMA standardization), unlike Java. Parrot has been "just around the corner" for years, and nothing I've seen has indicated that it will actually "come around the corner" any time soon. If you want to wait, or build your software on top of ever-changing beta code, go ahead and use Parrot.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[ambrosine10]

Those people criticizing Miguel really need to shut up. Here is a man who has contributed much code to open-source projects, is a great leader in the movement, and works for what he believes in. Yet these zealots are constantly yelling at him just because he happens to see MS technology in an impartial light. Just because it's by MS doesn't automatically make it bad. In fact if it wasn't for people like Miguel who try to merge practicality with idealism, the open-source movement would be as irrevelant as ever.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[IamTheRealMike]

First of all, there is no magic bullet to write quality desktop software and have it run anywhere. These days, if you want to write a program once and have it feel native on each platform, you need to be either using native widgets on each platform, or to have a big investment in custom code and tweaks in your toolkit for each platform.

GTK# runs on multiple platforms. Unsurprisingly it works best on the platform most people use it on. It does not run well on Windows or MacOS X, but that's simply because few people have worked on it/been interested in it. That can be fixed, with time.

When Miguel said "GTK# is the path to independence" he was talking about API independence not platform independence. They are different.

wxWidgets does not give platform independence. Sorry, but it just doesn't cut it for quality software. Abstractions work best when the things they abstract are semantically very similar (or identical) - widget toolkits are not similar, they often work in very different ways and have radically different capabilities. I've yet to run a wxWidgets app which didn't feel piss poor on every platform : much like Swing apps not feeling native everywhere, wxWidgets apps never fit in. This doesn't cut it for writing good software for the free desktop.

Or: With all these XML GUIs under .NET (like XAML) Ximian could've used Mozilla's XUL toolkit and have better multi platform integration than GTK.

GTK is a proven platform used by many, many applications. XUL is really only used by the Mozilla suite of apps: it lacks such basic things as the still theoretically xulrunner. That's why it was chosen.

Also - from what I've read on the mailing list archives - Mono only works sometimes on BSD systems. What kind of independence is this? You are only focused on x86-Linux running GNOME.

So what? Wine doesn't work on BSD systems currently either, but this is the fault of BSD not Wine (and I believe the same is true of Mono). Both Wine and Mono do very complex things with threading, address space management and low level OS calls that BSD either doesn't support or nobody with the relevant expertise has shown up to write the support. The vast majority of people use Linux, so this gets the best support. This is the open source meritocracy : write the code and the support will come, yes?