Mono Outpaces Java In Linux Desktop Development 598
dp619 writes "Mono, a framework based on Microsoft technology, has become more popular for Linux desktop applications than Java, but recent changes could strengthen Java's hand, SD Times is reporting. The story also touches on the failure of Linux distros to keep pace with Eclipse."
What is strengthening Java according to TFA? (Score:5, Interesting)
but recent changes could strengthen Java's hand, SD Times is reporting
OK, I've glanced over the article twice now, and can't see anywhere where they bring up what could be strengthening Java's position in the future?
I'm assuming it's updates to Eclipse, but they never state it explicitly, just that some Linux distros have weaker IDE support compared to MonoDevelop? *shrug*
Eclipse is stagnating (Score:0, Interesting)
Since Eclipse 3.1 is barely distinguishable from Eclipse 3.5 (other than an even greater mess in the preferences and project properties windows), I have to agree with the Debian team. Why bother upgrading?
Anyone who currently uses Eclipse: try NetBeans or IntelliJ for a week. You'll never want to go back.
Re:Microsoft shill (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe Microsoft needed someone to quote as saying "... Mono/.NET development has leapfrogged Java development on Linux, by a long shot" for yet another "Get The Facts" campaign ?
MS Is Making Fools Out Of The Open Source World (Score:0, Interesting)
The Microsoft 'community' - Microsoft friendly press, clowns like Miguel De Icaza, etc. all are playing hardball to fuck Linux on the desktop up and the Open Source community is just rolling over like pathetic little dogs.
That incompetent little Microsoft fanboy De Icaza successfully managed to derail the basic window/desktop management into to a pointless and futile war.
And now with this mono garbage they are derailing Linux application development. And you idiots are falling all over yourselves trying to prove to the world how 'open minded' you are for actually using patent encumbered Microsoft technology.
What a fucking joke.
Open source community - you're nothing but a bunch of suckers and losers.
Letting mono worm its way into Linux application development is like Microsoft making Linux hit itself in its face with its own fist like some contemptuous older brother who wants to see just how far he can humiliate his younger brother.
The execs up in Redmond must be shaking their heads in disgust at being faced with such a bunch of fucking losers.
Re:No mention of X-platform (Score:5, Interesting)
>> Think of network sockets, file access, threads, and a bunch of other things that quite frankly are annoying to do in C or C++.
You're just using the wrong C++ libraries.
Using Qt I can do all the things you mentioned and just about everything else in the C# and Java class libraries. Cross platform, without the performance and resource penalty of a virtual machine. Also the final product will appear more native on more platforms than C# or Java.
Also because of Qt's design, I barely have to bother with memory management in my GUI apps. So far I'm averaging one delete statement per 1000 lines of code. Everything else is cleaned up automatically. If I thought a bit harder about my design I could probably get rid of most of those deletes as well.
Miguel de Icaza - How much more damage can he do? (Score:1, Interesting)
You would think that after creating the Linux desktop Gnome versus KDE war and turning 'Year of Desktop Linux' into a joke and now something not even funny anymore, that Linux developers and distro managers would have gotten a clue.
How many more times is Lucy(Miguel de Icaza) going to hold that football out there for you Charlie Brown(Linux community) before you catch on?
Re:Compatibility != Equality (necessarily) (Score:3, Interesting)
Swing is nice if you understand GUI programming. What the GP was saying, is that for those who have had very little exposure to GUIs in general, learning a GUI toolkit that requires you to understand event models, widget placement, and the rest of the "theory" of UI, is a bit brutal. Of course, once you grasp the basics, Swings' "everything is really a container when you get down to it, even non-container components" model is quite slick. .NET however has a much smoother learning curve. You can do most basic apps with just drag, drop, double click. Then later on you can move on to the more advanced models. While Java IDEs do have very powerful GUI editors, they still require you to understand much more, not unlike .NET's WPF. And WPF is also brutal on those new to UI.
Re:No mention of X-platform (Score:3, Interesting)
Swing used the abstraction from the OS -because- of the inter-OS incompatibility between widgets. AWT uses native OS widgets throughout if that's your bread and butter. They subsequently added OS theme engines back into Swing due to the inconsistencies between everything. I don't have a problem with swing as it is at this point. Since 1.5's metal, the platform agnostic look and feels have really come upon their own. SWT has a few bases filled in by containing a larger set of widgets, and arguably better set of API's for some of them. I'd consider myself a java guru, and I still run into roadblocks extending existing swing components to add some new crazy behaviour. I can't even say if that's possible in other toolkits, but its not trivial in Swing.
A few questions (Score:2, Interesting)
How many companies use C# to write Enterprise-level servers?
What does C# give me that Java doesn't?
Unless all of the above have a positive and constructive answer, I don't see any point why I would learn another language for my Open Source projects/contributions when I'm an expert on Java due to my day-time job. This article is bullshit.
Re:I don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
It feels much more natural than Java programming.
chmod +x ./natural.exe
export DLLPATH=/usr/lib/libmono.dll
Yeah, right. Natural.
Re:What is strengthening Java according to TFA? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No mention of X-platform (Score:3, Interesting)
Strangely, I do Java work as my day job in Eclipse and C# in my spare time using Visual Studio (2005 Express) and MonoDevelop. While I prefer C# as a language overall, I'd much rather have something like Eclipse for C#! There's so much more power to it in terms of refactoring and other features that it puts the minimal functionality that Visual Studio always had to shame.
Re:Linux Desktop: Not freakin' Swing! (Score:3, Interesting)
but on the desktop integration is everything.
I hate integration. It means that a single update of a single package can bring the whole thing down. Honestly if i want to play music I don't give a carrots ass if its using the same font as the bloody word pad. I just want to play the friken music... I don't give a flip if it stores the setting in some kde standard place if it has crap playlist editing.... etc...
Whats the point of looking all nice and integrated if it doesn't bloody work? Which is why the bulk of the apps i use and find productive are bad examples of desktop integration.
More popular? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's like saying that hydrochloric acid is more popular as a drink than hydrofluoric acid.
Both environments are massive messes of overcomplicated languages with even more overcomplicated infrastructure, stuffed with random libraries and lovingly wrapped with overinflated egos of their designers and developers, and wankery of the users who think, it's the second coming of Lisp.
At this point there are five good choices for developing a new non-game GUI-centric application for Linux (or anything except Windows-only or OSX-only applications):
1. C++/Qt (KDE and everything useful in it, Opera, QCad, countless commercial applications).
2. C/GTK (GNOME and everything useful in it, X-Chat, Pidgin).
3. C++/GTK (OpenOffice.org).
4. Python/Qt.
5. Python/GTK.
This covers everything anyone would want in a GUI-centric application -- the five reasons I have seen for other combinations are:
1. As attempt to promote some crappy environment or a "my first application in <crappy environment>" project that got out of hand (Tomboy, Banshee).
2. Out of ignorance (all "enterprise applications" where Java was chosen because it's supposed to be "cross-platform").
3. A minimal update for some old application that was written before the above five choices became available (the only reason why I still have Motif installed).
4. The application IS an environment designed specifically for some set of goals (Emacs, Mozilla).
5. As a wrapper over something someone already written.
Re:Linux Desktop: Not freakin' Swing! (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, just like GTK+ and Qt have cross-platform capability, so do the bindings, and if the appropriate binding library for a given platform is installed on that platform, the Java application, too, will be able to be cross-platform without modification. This is, of course, the job of the distribution and/or installer software
This is not a trivial step. There will always be advantages to pure Java code, the most obvious being it runs anywhere you have a JVM, and installs and behaves exactly the same way with no platform dependent code.
Re:No mention of X-platform (Score:3, Interesting)
"Right, "Type Erasure" means that none of the semantic information is preserved in the produced bytecode or metadata."
I understand, and I can live with that.
It is not is if you can not do something, it just requires a more verbose approach e.g.
class Stack {
private T[] storage;
public Stack(Class type, int size) {
storage = (T[]) Array.newInstance(type, size);
}
}
But if it was just making an object do something instead writing libraries, why not simply:
class Stack2 {
private List storage;
public void init() {
storage = new ArrayList();
}
}
I've given lots of programming courses, and sometimes all this syntactic sugar is nice but when learning a language, these constructs can make it very difficult see the overall picture. I find that Java has a very clean set of language features that can be taught/learned easily.
I understand that you are a very gifted, above average intelligent programmer. But the average programmer is, by definition, well, average.
Well, there aren't that many people that start things like Gnome (my current desktop of choice -thank you) and Mono and can make such things work.
Re:Good (Score:1, Interesting)
a lot of shit there ... probably smoking something ... you don't understand ... you can't understand ... you shouldn't be spreading shit ... you must be out of your mind ... just a java fanboy ... nonsense shit
-1, Flamebait
I can't give numbers
So you base your argument on personal, subjective experience. Nice.
Disassemble a call to an extension method. It doesn't call a method on the same object in MSIL that it does in the source code. It's 'magic', which C# like C++ is full of. Just like the post said.
C++ isn't a supported language any more than JNI/C. So for usable languages you have C#, VB.NET (mostly a different syntax for C#), F#, IronPython. Compared to Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, JPython, JRuby, Fortress, etc. Your point?