OSS on win & Mono & cross-platform gui & Win php developer env

Lugedes OSSi kohta Slashdotist:

It is true though that for some unknown reason, corporate IT people won't even consider an open source app most of the time. Why businesses continue to hire these wastrels is beyond me though. Companies will throw millions of dollars into crappy proprietary software, then cut jobs when the red ink starts appearing.

I work for a major investment bank, building front and back office systems. Most of what I (and my team) do day to day is in Java - I use Eclipse as my IDE, build the code in Ant/Maven, and never go anywhere without my Apache Commons libraries. We have code generation tools which are built on Velocity, and everything's tested with JUnit. The finished stuff runs on Linux blades, often under JBoss or Tomcat - http duty is obviously also handled by Apache. When it comes to debugging web apps nothing beats Firefox & the HTTPHeaders extension.

But apart from that you're right - we're terrified of Open Source :)


Järgmine komm Mono kohta samast kohast. ASP.NET1.1 täielikult?! /:o$

While it may be insufficent to run every ASP.NET application, Mono's ASP.NET implementation does exist and is functional. They claim to support all of ASP.NET 1.1 and have implemented many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. Of course, I haven't used every feature of ASP.NET 1.1, but overall Mono works fine with everything I have needed to do.
The article is incorrect in saying "at this point in time DotNetNuke runs on ASP.NET, a services layer which is only available for the Windows platform - a situation which the Mono project is trying to address." ASP.NET is indeed available on other operating systems using Mono's implementation. In other words, the Mono project has already addressed this issue. While running ASP.NET applications with Apache and mod_mono isn't as easy to configure as, say, mod_php or any old CGI application, it's possible and not very difficult for anyone with experience configuring Apache and compiling Apache modules -- comparable to setting up FastCGI.

Mono's XSP, a small, simple web server, works great for serving up ASP.NET applications.

While .NET programs can be portable between Microsoft's .NET Runtime and Mono, just as software written in many languages can be portable between Windows and Linux, it's also possible to write software that only functions properly in one operating system or the other.


Edasi kasulik komm Win32 GUI kohta ja cross-platformsuse kohta:

gAIM works "OK". It's useable. Same deal with Ethereal. These apps would be a lot better if they used the native Windows APIs, or if they used a wrapper that was abstract enough to give them more the feel of a "real" Windows application. Not getting the Windows common dialog savebox when I want to save something is annoying. I understand why they did that--it was probably a lot easier to port. If I were looking to write GUI apps cross-platform though, I'd make sure the wrapper I was using came as close as possible to the look and feel of the native GUI on all the platforms I was trying to support. GTK ports are just crappy on Windows in too many ways to ever be the method I'd chose. It's been a while but I've heard wxWindows is pretty good in this regard. If so, more people should probably use it.

WAMPP - Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl:

Personally, I'm a big fan of platform-independent open source. I run XP at home and built myself a WAMPP development platform, using Windows XP, Apache 2, PHP, Perl, and MySQL. It makes my life easier, because I can use all my comfort-zone editors (text, bitmap, vector) and integrate the results into the dev site on the fly.

Would I care if a project that was really useful to me on Windows wasn't viable on Linux? Yes and no. I think that platform independence is a HUGE plus in the FOSS world. It definitely earns you bonus points. It increases the level of freedom the users of that project have. BUT, users of that project are also free to port it to other platforms. I wouldn't be able to run my WAMPP environment if people hadn't ported the AMPP portion to Windows.

Using more proprietary foundations like .NET do limit the usefulness of an OSS project, but only until people get interested in developing ports. If nothing else, you can build a forked project that uses the best logic and functions that aren't platform dependent and merges them with a more platform independent underpinning.

If you're developing OSS for .NET, kudos on being open source, but you do miss the bonus points for being platform independent and don't whine about not getting the cred platform-independent projects of the same nature do. If you're an OSS user who sees this great project built on a proprietary stack and are pissed because it's not available for your platform, "port up or shut up".

Mõttetera Postgresi näitel:

Just go look at the stats on sourceforge, software that runs on windows gets 10x the downloads that linux software does. A great example is Postgresql which was ignored by many until it got a windows port. Who needs respect when you've got popularity?