To the authors: any thoughts on Mono?

[Paul Santa Maria]

Hi -

Any thoughts on whether companies interested in Open Source J2EE might also consider - or maybe even prefer - .Net over J2EE? Do you think initiatives like Mono might pose a competitive threat to the J2EE community?

Thank you in advance .. PSM

[Christopher Judd]

Sorry, I have not been following Mono very closely. Following Java and all the open source Java projects takes all my free time. Well Java and my cute 6 month old son.

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

I've played with Mono and I think is a wonderful idea. I'm also glad that Novell is behind the wheel now. Miguel DeIcaza has wonderful intentions on where to take Mono, I'm just afraid that Microsoft is going to pull a "Microsoft" sooner or later and Mono will be force to become it's own platform by forking away from some of the APIs and keeping only some low level similarities/compatibilities with the .Net stack. I personally don't think we need a multilanguage environment (which we partially have with Java since there are countless of languages that can be compiled to Java bytecode). Basically I believe you can do ASP.Net with Mono currently which I think is MS killer technology (at least for medium size apps). But I think the future of Mono on Linux is to give LAMP applications some of the enterprise features that you get from J2EE without having to buy on the whole stack (e.g. lightweight containers in .Net like Pico, Nano and the like). This also involves making PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc. .Net compatible languages. Maybe the Spring Framework ported to .Net. That's where I see potential for Mono in the Enterprise arena. For GUI apps I think the combination of Java+SWT (or Swing for non traditional apps) can give you the same advantages as WinForms)

Brian