Slashdot Mirror
Mono Comes To Android
hairyfeet writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"
Guess I won't be kissing it for a week or so.
Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?
Neither. It will be exactly what it already is today, just one of many programming languages.
Finally I can hear good quality music with just the one earbud.
No, wait...
Reuters Minas Tirith - Mordor Inc. has announced the release of Ring of Power Open Source Version, to be released to the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. Mordor VP of Marketing, the Mouth of Sauron, has announced that the purpose of this open source version of the Ring of Power is to demonstrate Mordor's goodwill to all people.
"We're really hoping that all those Elves and Numenoreans and Halflings take our Open Source version of the Ring of Power and use it to do all kinds of nifty things." the Mouth of Sauron said. "There has been some animosity in the past between Mordor and the rest of Middle Earth, but we're pretty keen to the idea that this is the time to put it all behind us, so we're releasing, with this commitment from Sauron himself, open source Rings of Power with no future obligations to the Dark Lord, the Nazgul or anyone else in our organization."
When asked about previous attempts to take control of the other competing powers in Middle Earth (such as the infamous "One Ring to Rule Them All One Ring to Bind Them" proprietary patent-encumbered master Ring), the Mouth of Sauron dismissed it out of hand. "That was just business. But this is the dawning of a new age, and Mordor commits to not trying to seize control of the minds of any wielders of any open source Rings of Power... honest!"
(With files from Rivendell Archives)
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The iPhone developer licence forbids scripting engines or Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers, which .NET needs to run code.
Someone had better let all of the Unity IPhone developers know that they cannot use Mono C# on the iphone as it is forbidden. Really guys all of those apps you have been selling for the last two years for the IPhone is just not possible.
Got Code?
We already can program Android in Java (and Scala) and script it in Python, Lua, BeanShell, Perl, Tcl, JavaScript and Ruby. I hadn't noticed the multitudes crying out for Mono.
-=Maggie Leber=-
Congratulations! You won a heaping cup chock full to the brim with failure and abject destitution!
.NET 2 was a competitor to Java. Since then I believe the API has gone downhill so much that it really hinders development. Who comes up with data structures that throw an exception because you asked it if something was inside and the answer was 'no'?
Like all MS software, they will blunder on thinking they still drive the entire industry, completely ignoring EVERYTHING their customers tell them and fixing only security issues. Like Windows, .NET will one day be something we look back on while shaking our heads in wonder, with the same feeling you would get watching someone dial a rotary phone.
"...or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"
>>Implying that F/OSS groups are the only ones or even the majority that makes apps for android.
I hear that .Net framework is pretty good for building good games. So it will be interesting to see what comes out of this.
It's really great that there's finally a tool to make life easier for all the developers building Windows Phone 7 apps in C# that want to move their code base to the Android platform!
What about that?
First, this is just flamebait.
Second, the only people who want everything to be done in one language are those clueless zealots everyone finds an excuse not to hang out with after work.
Third, even if one language completely dominated the niche category of handheld consumer devices, it would mean nothing outside that niche.
Slow news day?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This just in: "Mono for Android includes the core Mono runtime, bindings for native Android APIs, a Visual Studio 2010 plug-in for developing and testing Android applications, and a software development kit (SDK). The enterprise edition costs $999 (£613) per developer per year, including maintenance and updates. A five-developer enterprise licence costs $3,999 per year, and a professional edition costs £399 per developer per year."
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/communication-breakdown-10000030/novell-releases-mono-for-android-toolset-10022167/?tag=mncol;txt
-=Maggie Leber=-
Exactly what I thought. So I went and looked - $99 for student (non-commercial use), $399 for basic commercial, through to $3999 for enterprise.
Crazy. Would love to use it, won't touch it with a barge pole at that price.
Sorry, $999 for 1 seat Enterprise, $3999 is for 5 seat Enterprise.
First, it is mono. Beside any technical argument. There are a lot of people who do not like mono, because it is an incarnation of evil (alias MS). I am not saying that it is, but many people feel that way. So this is definitely one obstacle. Second, Android and iOS are different enough to be different on the low level aka programming language level, which will result either in compatibility libraries which are wrappers and resemble at some point internal DSLs. And they result in another abstraction layer which costs memory and CPU power. When you used an iPhone 3G/3GS you already find your phone to slow. So why torture yourself with slow software. And fourth, there are other cross platform approaches which use external DSLs which do not introduce another layer of abstraction at runtime, only on built time. For example: http://code.google.com/p/applause/
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Miguel de Icaza, is that you? Because nobody else really gives a shit...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
For all those developers that really want to combine all the disadvantages of programming for Android with all the disadvantages of using a Microsoft-controlled API!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As I understand it, here is the chief complaint that people have about Mono: Microsoft could have some sort of patents that could apply to Mono; and Microsoft could in the future use these patents to do something bad.
I have never seen any specific examples given, it's just a general "there could be some patents" argument. In fact, I believe the theory is that these could be "submarine" patents, not known now but lurking invisibly.
Here's a specific example. This is a long essay about this very issue. What is the danger if we use Mono? "[C#] was developed inside Microsoft, so it's likely they have many patents to cover different aspects of its implementation." Got that? "it's likely" Microsoft has "many patents". Citation needed.
This is the 21st Century, and patents are not only public, there are patent search engines. Where are the specific examples?
The situation is even crazier due to the passage of time. Microsoft introduced .NET in the year 2000. It is now the year 2011. Patents in the USA today have a term of 20 years. Presumably these submarine patents were not filed the same year as .NET was introduced; that would be far too obvious... they were probably filed a year or two ahead of time. So presumably these patents have a maximum life of under 9 years, and probably under 7 years.
In the past 11 or 12 years, nobody has noticed these deadly patents, lurking. But wait: these could be true "submarine" patents, where the patent was filed but not granted yet, and Microsoft is using sleazy tricks to extend the filing period and delay granting the patents. This implies that the patent must have been filed before 1995, when the US patent system was changed (patent term went from "17 years after patent granted" to "20 years after patent filed", specifically to fix the problem of submarine patents). Thus, a true "submarine" patent would have to have been kept going via sleazy tricks for over 16 years now, and nobody has noticed it yet.
So, if I understand correctly, we shouldn't use Mono because it could be a trap. Microsoft could have patents nobody has noticed for a dozen years that will expire within the next nine years that could apply to Mono. Or else they could have pending patent applications that have been pending for over 16 years without anybody noticing; those would apply for 17 years after the patent grant finally occurs in the future.
And if the above turns out to be true, and you wrote a program in C#, what would Microsoft's remedy be? Would you be forced to pay them huge sums of money? Would you be forced to give ownership of your source code to Microsoft? Not likely, and anybody who claims it is likely needs to provide legal precedents showing such a remedy in a similar case. No, the only realistic remedy would be that you would have to choose between buying some sort of licensed version of Mono (to comply with the patent licensing terms), or stop using Mono.
And the obvious exit strategy is to rewrite your C# app in Java. That would be a pain, granted, but hardly the end of the world.
And that is even assuming that Microsoft was successful in asserting these hidden patents. After offering C# up as a free standard, and not taking any action for a dozen years, to suddenly assert hidden patents would leave Microsoft wide open to the "unclean hands" legal doctrine. It's hard for me to imagine Microsoft prevailing in this.
And nobody has yet proposed a motive why Microsoft should do this. How does Microsoft gain by backstabbing the C# community? In the near term they could gain some patent licensing fees, but in the long term they would be alienating people they have been trying to woo. How likely is this, really?
So, in conclusion: because of this nebulously scary potential situation with possible unknown Microsoft patents, Mono and C# are
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And here we keep telling clueless users that "it's not that kind of virus."
Let's see, Windows Phone apps are written in C#, iPhone apps are written in Objective C, and Android Apps are written in Java... so obviously using Mono on all three is going to be a big win for cross platform programming!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What does android get when kissing windows? ...
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Penicillin for Android next?
To help with mono infections?
(Yes, I know penicillin doesn't work on real world mono. It's a joke.)
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Every time you do that god kills a kitten...
I am a programmer and I program in C# sometimes. C# like Java, VB, etc. was established with the idea of high level quick programming. A programming language that allows anyone to program. The problem with it is, that, anyone programs in it. I won't go to say that you can't program hard core staff with it...just most of its programmers don't.
.Net framework. Having that said it's not a bad framework and brings the ability to develop cross-platform in C#. However, the fact that it only includes the basics disables that "rapid programming" paradigm which exists around C# + .Net in quite a large part.
Mono, is a framework and not a programming language. And it does incorporate the basic stuff of the
Programming cross-platform has never been and never will be trivial. Java offers that capability at a high performance cost (still). Also, looking at many OSS developments in Java I tend to think that it brews bad habit. Again, that might not be Java, it may be simply poor programmers and poor architects.
If searching for that "one language to rule them all, one framework to rule them all" grail, have a look at C/C++ and the standard libraries. But don't look at that as being the fastest development path. It's simply the smallest common denominator and that poses some challenges. Programming cross-platform is definitely not an easy task and not for everyone.
Food for thought: Not all software has to be cross-platform.
I can write a .NET program on native windows and when I launch the EXE on a machine with no .NET it will simply fail with an error number. It doesn't ask you if you want to put .NET on or even explain to you that you need it to run the program, it just fails.
So... the same thing that happens whenever you launch any other program with its required libraries missing? Try copying a native VC++ program to a system that doesn't have the VC++ runtime installed. It won't spoon-feed you information about what the VC++ runtime is, why you need it, where to get it, and how to install it; it'll just give you a cryptic error.
If you want to do deployment properly, you need an installer. With Visual Studio it's dead simple to make a setup program that'll check for prerequisites like .NET and install them automatically.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Use the HasValue property to check for null without causing an exception. Doesn't make that much sense to me, but it's not hard either.
C# and Linq To SQL is still way better than Java. I wonder if all this functionality will make it into Android...
Dear Microsoft,
If you were smart, you'd reinstate your Java to C# converter.
Signed,
Fed up Java dev...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
But it's not fixing the stray cat problem around my house.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
anything novell is offering is better suited for use as an example of what *not* to use. sorry, but someone please kill mono with fire, and while your at it, drive a wooden stake through the lump under the blanket next to it - silverlight.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Mono is not a language
Although you are technically correct that Mono is not a language, Mono IS a mechanism to use the C# language.
From there to actually develop applications for the iPhone, you make use of the Apple frameworks, which Mono has handily wrapped in C# wrappers.
So I wouldn't say it's "less" than anything, it's just basically a way to use C# for different platforms while still using the native libraries they offer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dance with the devil and you will pay his fee. There is no point to this. This Microsoft crap adds nothing you can't get without the taint.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nah, I give a shit too. Now that the MS vs Linux battle has come to the 'like kicking a puppy' stage, there's not a whole lot of reasons to continue the hate-fest on MS. If anything, the current attitude of Apple should be hated. Hell, Apple's bigger than Microsoft in stock value now. (Although that could just be the big boys giving Jobs a magic sendoff before he kicks the bucket. Then it looks like the world is going to go back to being dominated by IBM and Java, which is just going to end up back to the original 'Evil Empire' that IBM was in the 1970s.)
I've done Java, and I've done C#, and I gotta say the .NET framework is a lot easier to work with than the massive mess that is Java.
Mono has support for the language C# 4.0 targeting the CLI. The libraries may not be fully caught up with the libraries that ship with .NET 4.0, but the most important pieces are there. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.
Even Mono for Android is advertised as supporting a subset of .NET 3.5 (which uses C# 3.0) which includes all the languages features you mentioned.
Mono for Android even uses a Visual Studio plugin, making Visual Studio its preferred development environment.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Actually Mono runs 4.0 code just fine. Obviously you can't use WPF on it.
Death to curly braces and semicolons. We should just erase them from ASCII already. Disaster. Absolute worst way to organize language ever.
What does Java have that Python doesn't in two weeks?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
Every time you do that god kills a kitten...
and uses the fur to wrap a pair of handcuffs so you can get off the way you should, via punishment!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
It this succeeds, it validates their development framework: "See, it's so good the freetards even abandon their precious GNU and Java for it." But Miguel cannot possibly keep mono current, so the thing will always be obsolete. And then whenever MS wants they can shut down not only Mono, but all the projects built with it. That's the crippling blow they are waiting for. They are already directly suing over Android and that's not even slightly derived from MS products.
There are just too many good toolchains to invest the grey matter and training time in this trap.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What "bad blood"? There was a Mono presentation by Novell at the Microsoft TechDays 2011 in february in Paris. I was there.
Can't find an official page on the official site. But here is a link in french. http://blogs.dotnet-france.com/jeanphilippeg/post/TechDays2011-Mono-et-son-ecosysteme.aspx
It was also the major Microsoft strategy to move developers from a 32 bits environment. .NET makes applications less dependent on the underlying OS architecture, and that was a good move for them to have developers to make applications working on 64 bits Windows.
Google released C and C++ tools as well.
It would be cool if Android includes Java 7 lambda so more languages could be ported. Python is not officially supported but is a hack of Jython as it runs unmodified on android. Any app would have to include it to run.
http://saveie6.com/
Is the ring red?
I wont let mono anywhere near my phones and will strongly advice against it to anyone i know.
Mono is a big red flag with Microsoft infront of it just waiting to attack. Microsoft is in an all out patent war against anything related to Android and Linux.
HTTP/1.1 400
get up with blood-sucking, litigious fleas.
someNullableInt ?? 0
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Nah. When miguel posts, he posts as miguel.
/pedantic
Reply to That ||
Anyone have some secrets they might want to share about this ...I was thinking about getting into it, dont know if it is properly established yet as a framework...
Who comes up with data structures that throw an exception because you asked it if something was inside and the answer was 'no'?
Guido, that's who. One of the Pythonic principles is that forgiveness (try/except) is easier than permission (testing first).
To me it looks as if it would be counter-intuitive and suicidal to start going after everyone over Mono. It would kill the language everywhere, including Windows.
Would it kill the .NET languages on Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone 7, which can't use anything but .NET languages?
What's the appropriate sentinel value to return from an unsuccessful data structure query?
Null pointer. In Python, some_dict.get('tires') returns None if tires don exits in the dictionary. Likewise, in PHP, @$some_array['tires'] returns null (the @ means turn warnings into null returns). For extra credit, the caller could specify the sentinel value, which Python incidentally allows as the second optional argument to dict.get(key, sentinel=None).
The Python (and .NET, if you believe the OP) approach of throwing exceptions makes a lot more sense than something like "if(value = get('foo') == 0) { printf("not found\n");}" for most situations.
Unless you're trying to write something in a functional paradigm, such as in a Python generator expression. There is no facility for try/except within Python generator expressions; instead, you have to def an inner function and catch the exception inside that. (But then the details of Python are probably off-topic here, as the cases where you'd need Mono probably involve portability to some platform without the System.Reflection.Emit that IronPython requires.)
Did I miss something or is this Mono for Android not going to be available on Linux?
Windows Phone 7 is stillborn
Even after Nokia's deal?
Porting [Xbox 360 Indie] games to a phone is still going to require a major rewrite anyways
How so? I've read reports that porting between XNA on WP7 and XNA on Xbox 360 requires 1. rewriting the input and 2. using lower detailed meshes and textures on the phone. That's it. Even in a case where you'd have to replace the entire graphics engine, such as between XNA and Mono for Android, game logic elements such as collision detection and enemy behaviors would remain unchanged across platforms that support the same programming language. See my article about multitier architecture.
Microsoft? The key to Android app portability? What the heck are you smoking?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hi .. i read your all questions and if you really want to get the reply and really ask and wants more questions and answer then i am putting the link here for all of you there you may get all better quality answers. And also if you are interested to ask questions then you may ask too. The link is under below!
http://www.sawanswers.com/