Somehow a minute news item regarding the deprecation of an API in Mono, inflates to the following loaded statements:
1h14m: "What it comes down to...Mono is an ill-informed kind of thing to do..." 1h15m5s: "All it did was to confuse the issue for a while..." 1h15m28: "They are not going away completely..." 1h16m13: "Where the story falls over, is where you have to write a separate UI for each of the platforms..." 1h18m04: "*Sigh* They'll keep trying... Mono has never been a slam dunk, we'll see if they ever get anything compelling". Let's address this objectively without any preconceived notions or agendas for a moment, as seen from someone with a leg in both camps: Fact; Microsoft submitted C# and the runtime spec to Ecma and has never sued anyone implementing on top of these (I.e. Boo, IronPython, Unity etc.). Meanwhile, Sun never submitted Java to any standards org, but instead made all the terms and holds veto power in the JCP. Indeed, it would prove to come at a catastrophic cost to the alternative implementation Apache Harmony. Also, Oracle's attempted to copyright the API's. So tell me, who looks like the bad guys here?! Moonlight made Linux people able to consume Silverlight content, not unlike IcedTea made Linux people able to consume Java content. The RIA plugin race was a confusing time in general, but is there a particular reason to slander Mono for not foreseeing that none of the RIA technologies, incl. Silverlight, were the way forward? Xamarin aren't going anywhere, they simply halted development on a deprecated technology. Has this not been known to happen in the Sun camp? (JSR-295, JSR-296 etc.) If we have learned anything from Java, it is that a cross-platform UI toolkit just doesn't cut it - it will always be the hunt for the lowest common denominator, which is low enough to make crap on all platforms, but not low enough to make quality on any single one of these. Swing took MVC too far, while the true power of this pattern comes from being able to plug-in a new VC layer on top of M. This separation of concerns is hugely successful across the board, indeed today you even find this applying to hardcore game engines (QuakeEngine, UnrealEngine, CryENGINE etc.) which are licenced so that developers may only have to focus on front-end stuff (VC). Giving birth to a whole industry seems like a success criteria right? As to the "nothing compelling" remark, I think you'd have to be pretty dumb, not to see the advantage of being able to target 3 separate platforms (Android, iOS and WinMobile) from within one unified umbrella when it comes to IDE, language and support. Perhaps not as interesting to a large multi-national corporation, but certainly to smaller teams with a mobile-oriented marked and limited resources or time-to marked requirements. Look, I get it, Microsoft were a$$es in the past and you can of course spread all the FUD you want on your very own podcast - but realize that it makes you sound like old grumpy men with an agenda, and that some of the greatest leaps forward comes from cross-pollination... even if you are allergic to those pollen. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/JDegHA9Z_Q4J. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
