Yogi Yang wrote: > > I am told by my boss to evaluate Mono whether it will be suitable for such > a complex system or not? > > But then while searching on net I read somewhere that Mono's future is not > very clean now that Attachment has acquired it. > > I would like input from community on this. > > Is choosing Mono the best thing esp. when we want to develop a multi OS > based software or not? > > Can someone please give unbiased opinion please? > > Regards, >
First, on the future of Mono... Mono is an Open Source project with a lot of supporters. There is no doubt though that the core of this has been the team at Novell (Attachmate). The good news is that pretty much the entire team has formed a new company (Xamarin) focused on Mono. So they are still together. They are funded now, and I think the business model will be very successful. They have a couple income generating contracts already. Products are supposed to appearing 3-6 months from now. They already have a bunch of partners. Also, I would expect them to take pretty much all of Novell's customers with them (just as a starting point). There is already a LinkedIn group of will-be (want to be now) customers for their mobile products for example. That said, they are a new company so only time will tell. Ultimately, you have to make your own call. Mono seems to be very healthy in my opinion though. Check out the number of commits since the Attachmate team was sacked for example. You will see that development has not slowed down at all. Given the recent turmoil, this is a real testament. I believe that the future of Mono is very bright. As for suitability, I believe you would be very happy with Mono as a solution. There are a lot of complex projects and products based on it now. Probably the biggest area of concern in the past has been the garbage collector. It has improved by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. I expect 2.12 out soon which will be the third full release supporting .NET 4. That is not to say that you could not run into a specific area of performance concern with your app when using Mono. The good news is that, if this were to happen, you have the code and you can fix it for all of us. The Mono team have always been amazingly open and responsive in my experience. I would expect that to continue. Mono on Linux is very mature. OS X has traditionally lagged a bit but has been a real area of focus (there are products that depend on this platform now) and has really caught up. I think that the GTK# experience is still better on Linux than on the Mac. Besides, the proper way to do a GUI on Mac is to use MonoMac. If you are targeting the web, ASP.NET MVC 2 (actual Microsoft code) ships out of the box with Mono. I do not have much direct experience with Mono on FreeBSD or Solaris. I know that Codice Software has a commercial product (Mono based) that is supported on Solaris. One of the great things about Mono is that only the core has to be ported to new systems. You would want to do some testing though depending on what platforms you wanted to support (Haiku is not ready for instance). You can deploy Mono on Windows but really you will probably just want to use Microsoft .NET there. You can use Mono assemblies on .NET if you use anything that is Mono specific. Just include them in your app. One piece of advice, design your app for Mono first with the idea that .NET on Windows is just one of your target platforms. Apps written for .NET first and then moved to Mono run into more problems. There are a bunch of reasons. First, you will avoid doing simple things that can become a hassle, like hard-coding platform specific paths, or not paying attention to case, or sneaking in P/Invokes. It will also prevent you from using an unsupported technology, like using Entity Framework as the ORM or something. Any performance problems or other issues will either get fixed as you go along or you will just do it another way. You will hardly notice. It will be just another one of those things that happen during development no matter what platform you are using. -- View this message in context: http://mono.1490590.n4.nabble.com/Suitability-of-Mono-tp3538305p3539875.html Sent from the Mono - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - Mono-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list