The Best of Both Worlds: The Role of Mono in Multi-Platform Application Development
Have a Windows application, but want to port it to Linux? Mono lets you keep your source code and run on Linux, too. Mono founder Miguel de Icaza explains.
After a period of maturation and acceptance lasting several years and three releases, Microsoft.NET development has become commonplace, and is widely used to develop custom applications within enterprises. Over the last year,. NET was responsible for the majority of new enterprise IT development done on the Microsoft platform, and a 2005 survey by Forrester found that 56 percent of IT respondents in the enterprise favor. NET for development. Additionally, commercial applications from third parties and ISV’s written for the. NET Framework have become increasingly more commonplace.
Many development teams enjoy the productivity inherent in using Visual Studio and its wealth of tools for rapidly producing high-quality code. However, many teams would also like the ability to deploy on platforms other than Windows. In a recent FTP conference survey on Web application development and deployment, for example, developers overwhelmingly preferred working in Visual Studio, yet almost half wanted to deploy on multiple platforms, including platforms other than Windows.
Cross-platform application development is the role of the Mono Project (http://www.mono-project.com/), an open source implementation of the ECMA International standards that define the. NET platform. The standard defines an advanced runtime environment for running modern applications and a complete set of libraries for developing server and desktop applications. The Mono Project has two goals: to bring the same advanced features now available to Windows developers to Linux, Mac OS X, and other operating systems, and to assist Windows developers in bringing applications to Linux.
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