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Mono Progress In the Past Year
Eugenia writes "OSNews posted an article accounting the applications created in GTK# the past 8 months, since the release of Mono 1.0. While many of them are still in their infancy, it's clear that the platform had a healthy progress, with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems, like SportsTracker, PolarViewer, MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk. The 2.0 version of Mono is expected around May, but the developers advised distros and users to upgrade to Mono 1.1.4 despite being a beta."
Mono is a wonderful piece of reverse engineering, many of these apps I didn't even realize were Mono apps and I have been using them for a while now. In addition I found a couple that I am going to start using such as portage-sharp.
Keep up the good work Mono team, I love C#, and I love how you are brining it to *nix.
I fear the day when Microsoft will come and snatch this out from under the Mono team, but I really think this benifits Microsoft just as having an open source version of Java benifits Sun.
Miguel de Icaza interview about mono on lug radio. Really nice one.
I haven't heard of even one of these "super hits." I think that should have been punctuated,
with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other less-known gems,
[
I'm just getting into C#, and I love it. One interesting thing I found was that if I ran a socket server app on Windows, I couldn't connect more than 64 clients in a single thread. I tried the same binary on Linux/Mono, and it bombed out at 1011 connections.
Keep up the good work - I'm loving it!
I'm really looking forward to Dashboard (not mentioned in the article), the desktop app that uses Beagle to gives relevant information that it's collected on your computer about your current activity. It sounds really cool, and Open Source hackers came up with this before Microsoft did.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Ok, Microsoft Is evil, this I will give you, but C# rocks. After years in C and C++, I moved to Java, and It was good, then about 2 years ago I moved to C# and it was better. Now I program in both, for work and graduate school. I have to say they are very similar, but when I am doing a program in Java, I always miss a few of the C# features (virtual keyword for functions, Get/Set are better in C#, etc)
/.ers . If we can start making programs for the general population that run on *nix systems, but look just like they do on windows, more people will use *nix. What we have to realize is that most people in the world(not on this website J) don't have 4 computers in their basement running different operations systems, they just have the one running windows.
The only problem I have with C# was that it was not as portable as Java, but Mono came to my rescue. I was surprised how many of my program just worked in Mono (after removing winforms that is). I can't wait for version 2.0.
Really, Mono should be embraced
P.S. And for some reason, they still have the sides on their computer case.......
I just went to Mono Project. They call it a ".NET" implementation. I further understand why they like to make the distinction between the ".NET Framework" as being specifically the C# and CLR pieces vs ".NET" that Microsoft refers to, but I'm afraid this is a very poor decision. Here's why.
.WEB Framework by Microsoft".
".NET" is Microsoft's brand. They use it to refer to many many different pieces of their technology that use the CLR/C# runtime. This includes such nebulous things as "Sign In.NET", the button that people use to login to MSN and Hotmail. What on earth does that have to do with Mono????? How is that related??
Furthermore, all of the tools that *include* many, many technologies that do not fit under the ".NET" umbrella (if strictly defined as the C#/CLR pieces) sport the brand. Even VisualStudio.NET is not completely a ".NET" thing.
So, my very firm advice and solemn plea is for Mono completely to drop *ALL REFERENCES* to ".NET". It is doing them no good whatsoever and just confusing people. It is not clear at all what ".NET" really is, and I'm afraid the Mono team have been roped into Microsoft's marketing machine, not realizing what's being done to them. In addition, I think that ".NET Framework" is equally muddled and confusing. I would recommend that they refer to Mono only as an implementation of the C# and CLR specifications as outlined by the EMCA standards body, with a link to those specific standards.
Otherwise, they are showing a complete ignorance of basic marketing. They are simply reinforcing Microsoft's brand in a very significant way, not just implementing their technologies. This may not be so bad, but one thing that Open Source/Free Software *really* *really* *really* desperately needs to get better at is marketing, if it ever hopes to get beyond an also-ran technology implementor of other peoples' technology. Take a small lesson from Firefox. If Microsoft released a XUL clone, integrate it with some parts of XAML, and changed the name of Internet Explorer 7 to "InternetExplorer.WEB", I would sincerely hope that Mozilla would not start calling Firefox an "Open Source implementation of the
I don't see how writing Gnome applications in C# benefits Microsoft any more than writing Gnome applications in C++ or Python.
Those same applications will also run under Windows, which means people dont have to run a competitors OS to run the software. Plus, they can sell MS Office.NET to Linux users too, as it can run on Linux.
I.O.U One Sig.
You should try gcj with the SWT or gnome-java bindings. Nothing doggy about it. :-)
BTW, gcj is the gcc Java compiler.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
At least give the program a somewhat descriptive name, ie Office, Internet Explorer, TurboTax, NotePad, Photoshop, etc...
Yeah, and forget Access, Visio, Excel, BOB, Acrobat, Encore, PowerPoint, and similarly named programs. I can't tell what they do either just by their names....
I don't know the detailed inner workings, but it seems like these projects are forever doomed to being a shadow of a "mostly" implimentation riddled with "gotchas" and always a few steps behind. I don't blame the developers in any way, its just we all know MS does not play nice with others.
I just happen to be one of the few official developers for the mono project, just catching this artical early.
Great, now that you are here:
A while (a year or two?) ago Novell was asking MSFT to clarify the IP issues with Mono, or at least to declare that Mono does not infringe MSFT IP, i.e. that it's safe to use. What happened with that? I'd certainly like to get a form of reassurance that it's going to stick around and be safe to code for, esp. with the emergence of projects like IronPython...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Thank you for your post. I was one of those that believed because it was an ECMA standard that it was free and open.
I went to the ecma site and saw this page:
WARNINGS
The liability and responsibility for the implementation of an Ecma Standard rests with the implementor, and not with Ecma.
Below that was a warning and a linke about settling patent issues pertaining to ECMA standards. Scary.
B
Message to moderators:
Stop modding down any anti-Mono posts. Many of them have valid points.
I'm primarily a *nix developer, but this Mono implementation of
A good portable way to write programs might be to write the application core in standard C++, then write the UI in C#/Mono on *nix, Obj-C on OS X, and C#/.NET on Windows.
Thoughts?
It's all a matter of how you choose your metrics. Here's another one, desktop applications that don't suck horribly:
Java: Azureus, Eclipse.... I'm sure if I really searched I could find a third.
Mono: Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot, Muine, MonoDevelop etc.
It's no sillier a metric than the amount of showelware on SourceForge for a given platform. For the Linux user it's certainly a more interesting one.
Even these so called crown jewels of the Java desktop can be spotted a mile away as Java programs. When you run Beagle or Tomboy you can not distinguish them from native GTK+ apps. For all intents and purposes they are native.
Java and Mono have chosen completely different paths at this point. It's futile to try to evangelize one language over the other at this point. Java has settled as a backend language for stuff like web services, while Mono/.NET competes with the incumbent C/C++, and Python to some extent, over the desktop. It's now a case of different tools for different jobs, and at this time it's already pretty clear that Mono is going to be a major force when it comes to the future of the Linux desktop.
It's like deja vu all over again.
1. Mono is an implementation of an open standard. That this standard was developed by MS doesn't change the fact that it is an open standard. This standard is not controlled by our Redmond friends. Sure they are free to add new things to it, but that doesn't really affect mono, as mono as it is now will still be available and all the apps written with mono and gtk# will still be available.
.net as cross platform, MS has been very aware of mono and can be shown to have been very aware of it and on top of it they even worked together with the mono devs, so claiming that, oh, we just found out that something terrible is going on here probably wouldn't have any chance to stand up in court.
2. I agree with your "appreciation" of MS bussiness practices and I readily agree with you that MS wouldn't shy away from even the most disgusting legal assault on open source if it thought to profit from it. But this holds true with mono and without it.
I think one can even argue that attacking mono would be the stupidest thing MS could do, as, again, it's an open standard, MS is marketing
Then why is it that my Linux Desktop, using Open Source Software almost exclusively (Opera being the exception) doesn't have one single Java App or Library in the whole dependency tree of all the apps I use? After all there are lots of C, C++, Perl, Python and Ruby apps and libs.
Why is it that anytime someone asks for an example of a decent Java App the Java Fanboys come up with either Eclipse (doesn't count, only useful with Java) or Azureus?
Why is it I have to install old versions of the Java Runtime to run certain InstallAnywhere Installers (like Borland Together, needs 1.3.1, didn't run with 1.4.2 runtime, needed it because a University Software Engineering Course insisted on it). Never had that problem with Perl or Python.
Sure, you may have caught lots of PHBs with all that hype around Java but how much of it really pays off in the real world?
Linux is not Windows
Mono is slow and bloated compared with Java.2 005/Fe b-09.html
You obviously didn't measure, see:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/
Each platform has different HIGs which determine how an application should behave as well as how it should look. Using the same UI code on multiple platforms results in apps that don't match the HIGs on any platform except (if you're lucky) the one on which they were developed.
Which raises the interesting question of whether we should be looking for another level of abstraction for GUIs beyond widget toolkits that let you write one codebase that then applies the HIG rules of the platform (which, of course, have to be something formally codified rather than just a spec document) to generate a (relatively speaking) HIG compliant UI.
Imagine having applications written on a level such that the "OK/Cancel" button order is determined by the platform rather than by where the code explicitly placed the buttons. Such would certainly make GNOME and KDE much more compatible. At the same time it would formalise the HIG from a "reccomended way of doing things" into a mandated consistent GUI.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Yeah, I love how anything that isn't rabidly pro-Mono instantly gets marked troll.
Guess what: there's this simple problem with Mono. It's OS/2 all over again, except Linux is already losing.
Mono spells the end of the Linux desktop, not that there was any Linux desktop in the first place. Why? Mono offers a path between Linux and Windows that allow you to keep the same apps.
Except that Windows.NET apps are guarenteed to run on Windows, but may not run on Mono, and Mono apps are guarenteed to run on both.
Meaning that you get a larger pool of software on Windows, like you already do. Meaning that there's basically no point in writing a Linux port when you can write a Windows version and claim that it runs under Linux due to Mono.
Mono will help ensure that our desktops and servers continue to run Windows. Sounds like a real win to the open source community.
Linux is already basically cut out of the desktop since people will use whatever comes with their computer, which is universely Windows (or MacOS), and companies will continue to pay top-dollar for whatever the salesman sells them. Mono will help Microsoft in the long run by ensuring that Windows runs more software than Linux does (which it, of course, already does).
In fact, this is already happening to a lesser degree. At one point we were going to buy a Red Hat support contract where I work, but because Apache, MySQL, and Tomcat all run on Windows, we instead decided to stick with Windows 2000 Server, since that's what Dell sells us anyway. We're considering getting new servers, too - which will be running Windows 2003 Server, of course. They'll be running Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, and a CVS server on Windows - because that's what the computer comes with.
If those apps were only available for Linux, we'd probably be running Linux servers right now. But since they have Windows ports, we use Windows instead. It's considered "more secure," too, because IT already tests for Windows security and it would "cost extra" to keep up to date on Linux patches. So - no Linux for us, thanks to portability to Windows.
Have you EVER used wxWidgets? No, have you even READ TF website?
wxWidgets is NOT an EMULATOR layer. It's a parallel implementation of an UI using the Native OS's widgets. From the wxWidgets site: "the open source, cross-platform native UI framework
with twelve years of evolution behind it".
It's not about how a widget should LOOK or FEEL. It's about using THE SAME CODE to make a program.
They even got a PalmOS version now.
Maybe for your small needs you don't need cross-platform. Maybe you're happy crunching bits and recompiling the most of your kernel, but you're certainly not the average Joe User - and that's a majority that has needs. These people right now are screaming when their machines are being invaded by spyware, viruses (and coming soon, rootkits)
. These people need to escape. And cross-platform applications is the way to go.
But if you really want to help people migrate from Windows to a safer Linux environment without losing their friendly commodities, at least you should give programmers the benefit of the doubt.
I AM a windows user. But I'm planning on migrating. And I want OTHER people to migrate to Linux. Linux doesn't belong to elitists... it belongs to the world, that's why it's Open Source, and GPL licensed. So please, stop building iron walls and let the Windows prisoners escape to a safer world.
After all, don't you want to be among the ones who were there, the day Microsoft died?
Certainly, I do.
Do you mean that it is available at no cost ?
If this is the case, then so is Java's runtime AND development environment.
If not then I assume you mean it is "open-source", which is confusing since:
Secondly, why do I need a Windows version of Mono when as stated in the projects FAQ, Question 1: What Exactly is Mono ?:
The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Novell that is working to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft
(See the http://www.mono-project.comabout/index.html page for details)
Lack of webservices is a major stumbling block for my development team. We'd love to be runnning on Mono vs. .Net, but the lack of even a light at the end of the tunnel for web service integration is keeping LOTS of developers at bay.
Also, the list of dependencies to run monodevelop is astronomical. After my 7th or 8th trip to google to find some arcane dependency, I gave up. I think it's better if you are running gnome, but not much.
Having recently considered learning C#/Mono, a few things bugged me. Firstly, it was not easy to find a tutorial more complex than Hello World but less complex than "oh, look, we're going to be making a wordpad clone". Considering that it is much easier to program with C and GTK, or C++ and QT or GTK--, it will take some serious work to make Mono attractive if you're looking to attract the people who don't need Windows compatibility.
Yeah, like OpenOffice.org - what were they thinking? (posting ac 'cause I've modded in this thread)