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michael
from the fighting-diseases-with-diseases dept.
jeffy124 writes: "ZDNet is reporting a story in which Ximian will announce on Monday a project dubbed "Mono" that will produce an open-source product to challenge Microsoft's.NET initiative."
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Generally, Open Source projects are created to fill a need. Where is the need for.NET or a.NET replacement? What exactly would it do? Let's see...
Store everyone's personal information on a centralized server (to make it easier for programmers to help each other, of course!).
Make sure everyone can only get their code through the.NET replacement. Well, ok, we'll provide hyperlink to a hierarchy of most of the source code files, but don't you think it'd just be easier to pay us a subscription and get it through our.NET replacement instead?
The compelling need that Microsoft is trying to fill with its.NET strategy is to fill its own profit margins. I haven't seen that need arise in the Open Source community as yet.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday July 05, 2001 @02:43PM (#105765)
> KDE's got kParts to match bonobo, but other than
> that, it looks like they're not getting involved
> in this stuff. Why is that?
We try to make KDE fit the needs of our users. I
haven't seen a single request for.NET from our
users. In fact, I haven't seen a single person who
could tell me what it is, what it does, what
problem it tries to solve or for what kind of
things it should be used.
Bonus points to Ximian for punning the Spanish word "mono" for monkey (an animal that looks sort of like the Ximian mascot) with the disease "mono" (which is apparently similar to the "viral" Linux operating system).
.NET sounds cool, but it is still vaporware. There is no real need for it yet in the OSS/FS community.
Actually, that's exactly why it's needed - this is a shot at getting ahead of the game rather than always being behind the game. If the OSS/FS community could deploy a.NET-like technology before Microsoft even gets out of the gate with theirs, it might cut them off at the pass(port).
It's a longshot - but if IBM, Sun, HP and the rest got behind a true open standard Web services framework, Microsoft wouldn't be able to deny its competitors an equal playing field -- which is exactly what it wants to do with.NET -- they want to deploy pieces of.NET to other OSes to lure people in to using it, but the choice bits will only work with Windows. An open.NET would allow everyone to have an equal footing. Sure, Microsoft could still play ball, but they'd lose some of their bully power.
I think there are some Exchange replacements in the works, but I don't recall exactly what company is behind them.
Why? Just because Microsoft is doing it does not mean we should follow along.
If microsoft does it, companies will use it, when lots of apps use.net and there's no hope of an opensource clone, or it's very difficult to do right, it's going to be rather hard to integrate a linux machine into your office isn't it?
It's not about following along, it's more like we're flanking them. They want to make the internet proprietary, and if nearly every windows user goes along with them, they'll succede, and linux will be useless online. If we develop something to compete, they may not.
Not very well stated, but I'm tired, I'm sure you'll get the idea of what is meant, other posters have said similar things.
As to the point about java/xml, the other post in reply to your's says it very nicely... [aol]Me Too[/aol]
Bynari at http://www.bynari.net/ [bynari.net] already has an Exchange replacement for Unixoid operating systems:
Bynari's Insight Server provides services to Microsoft Outlook clients and various Linux and UNIX clients provided by the Open Source community and Insight Client. Insight which can come bundled with Insight Server works on various Linux distributions, Sun Solaris for Sparc and x86, and SCO UnixWare and Compaq's Non-Stop Clusters using Proliants and UnixWare. In the glass house, Insight Server runs on IBM zSeries and S/390 mainframes under TurboLinux.
It's not Free Software, but it uses free software components, eg., Exim, OpenLDAP, etc. And it has a very modest price compared to Exchange:
Insight allows unlimited users to access its services based on the platform. With Insight Server the cost of the product is based on the size of the user base each version supports. For example, a 100 user version of Insight Server costs $2.99 per user. A 500 user version would
cost $1.19 per user. That's a one time charge.
Compared to Exchange:
The cost of Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server with 25 CALs is $6,999. Each new Client Access License costs $67.
A company with 5025 users on Microsoft Exchange would pay $335,000 for new Client Access Licenses and $6,999 for the server. The total cost in this scenario would run $341,999.
1) Since Java already have all the functionality.NET is supposed to have (XML-RPC,SOAP,CORBA), wouldn't it be possible to write an emulation layer that would translate.NET to Java ? Like classloader that would take CLR bytecode file and load it as java class (pre-cached probably), together with some wrapper library for basic.NET functions. Using reflection API you could then provide.NET code with access to all Java class functions.
This would make sence, since Java already have huge installed base. Surely stuff like native code would be most likely impossible to implement, but if about 70% of.NET code could be just translated to Java, many companies would probably go that route.
2) Is.NET really a development platform ? I was under impression it's a quick hack of Java, but with more impact on parts of software being run remotedly at Microsoft.
Like word runs on user machine for efficiency reasons, but connects to MS server and calls one or two remote functions without which Word won't work, so that MS could charge user insane amount of money every 2 weeks. Or even worse, all user documents are encrypted, each time Word runs it downloads decryption key and encryption key for the next session - that way MS would keep user as hostage and he/she won't be able to switch to let's say OpenOffice.
IIRC, that was the goal behind.NET, and it's technology is mediocre at best.
3) Anyone knows any reliable documentation on.NET architecture? MSDN, I think was created by NSA to exchange encrypted information, since there's no way I could understand anything if I try to read without the key...
Opinions are mine only and could change without notice.
I'm a little bit confused. Well first of all most of the pages linked to from that Linda page come back with 404.
I'm also a bit unclear what you mean regarding asynchronous components. If I read you correctly, COM+ already supports this by way of queued components. It's simply implemented on top of message queues, which is a very good mechanism for asynchronous communication.
From that articles point of view they are comparable with C# only being slightly slower in memory access.
It's difficult to say because Microsoft technically disallows published benchmarks.
As far as your concern regarding security of the data. Yes being XML it is sent essentionally as text. Even if it was binary data it still would not be safe without the use of SSL.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a company would wish to use SSL or perhaps a VPN or even a leased line. I also don't think it's unreasonable for Microsoft to make this assumption, certainly if they had implemented a different solution they would have been accused of subverting standards, whatever.
For my part, I really could care less about Web Services. What I'm most interested in is how they've improved the languages and the development environment for web apps, etc.
Open standard means that it's published, not that it achieves world domination. MS clearly intends it to be a single "log in" for all internet services. OK, that's not such a bad idea, but it's a bad idea for Microsoft to be the sole organization in charge of such a thing. If we were able to get a look at how it works, then we'd be able to say if it was any good technically or not. MS, for all of its sins, employs some good software engineers and is responsible for a number of standards that have already been incorporated into GNOME. We might well want to go along and do things their way if the main objection to doing so, their central control, was not an issue.
As a general policy, our goal is not to destroy Microsoft, but to make a good partner of them. I'm not sure either one is possible, though:-)
Hey, I'm a Java guy, and I've learned a lot about performance. Java can be made to perform. Especially server-side. But Java pre-v1.4 has some known problems with Swing. Namely, it doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration for simple items like scrolling and popping up windows. If you have a reasonably large list displayed in a pulldown menu, you can get unreasonably long pauses when drawing the menu. Or scrolling.
Now, JDK v1.4 fixes these problems. It's still in beta, but check it out. For client-side applications, performance feels, subjectively, native speed now.
I think Java is viable for client-side programs now. But lets not confuse.NET and Java..NET equates more easily to Sun ONE. That is, Java + SOAP/WSDL/UDDI + XML + J2EE..NET has an architecture that can be compelling for many network applications (for instance, where speed is not as necessary as reliability, recoverability, and logged transactions). The CLI is a very nice method for cross-language development. A common object model across languages is a Good Thing.
I welcome this. I will remain a J2EE programmer (check out JBoss--the best app server available, and it's Open Source, and Resin, for which a soon-to-be announced JVM integration with JBoss is coming soon). I will likely develop for Sun ONE. And I will likely integrate.NET components as SOAP services. Openness is good. And the.NET architecture is well done, as well. Don't discount Microsoft--this one is so good that IBM and Sun have adopted major pieces of it, as well.
Pick up JDKv1.4beta. I think you'll change your mind. Sun has finally taken advantage of hardware acceleration for things like scrolling. So apps now feel like they're native speed.
I agree wholeheartedly with you for pre-v1.4 stuff, though. Performance is lousy. But Java, as a language, is the Right Mix when it comes to object orientation, ease of use, rich library, well designed GUI (yes, I said it was well designed...not fast...but plz. check v1.4 for speed), and capabilities for RAD development. It rocks on the server, and I think it will soon be acceptable for internal application development (i.e. RAD dev).
Seattle, WA (AP) - Microsoft corporation has filed a lawsuit against the distributers of MicrosoftFUD. Claiming that MicrosoftFUD is a cancer, and a blemish against Microsoft's good name, Chairman Bill Gates announced to a packed conference room that this MicrosoftFUD must be stopped. "Second rate open source software must not be allowed to besmirch the good name of Microsoft. MicrosoftFUD is just a poor quality product promoted by a bunch of weed smoking hippies", said Gates, adding that no sane business would consider running on top of the MicrosoftFUD platform.
Let's call it MicrosoftFUD. Won't it be amusing to see press releases from Microsoft denouncing some open source project called "MicrosoftFUD"?
Seattle, WA (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said today that MicrosoftFUD was a cancer, and bad for business. After a round of snickers in the conference room, the obviously flustered billionaire shouted "MicrosoftFUD sucks!" loudly and stormed out of the room."
Here's my take on why Mono should be ported to BSD:
MS has already announced that they are going to port.NET to BSD. Keep in mind that BSD still has a few technical advantages over Linux as a server OS, and it has a few really big users (Yahoo! for example). So, there's a lot of money involved. It makes for Ximian to want to grab that share of support dollars.
For this same reason (BSD as server), BSD support becomes important for expanding Mono's mindshare. Knowing MS, they will probably introduce certain "features" into.NET to make it completely and utterly incompatible with Mono. That means that any company that is using BSD for serving applications is going to have to choose between Mono and.NET for compatibility. With MS behind.NET, Mono is going to have a hard time in that market space, even if Mono is a superior product. With no BSD support for Mono, the choice is automatic.
Ximian can't afford to screw around on this. If they get Mono right, it could be a company maker.
I'm very happy to see Ximian working on this project, and I think it will do much to help Open Source at least stay level with Microsoft. However, I am curious as to what advantages Mono and.NET would offer over Java.
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that Java already gives us a virtual machine (for compile-once-run-anywhere), Enterprise already gives us CORBA (as opposed to COM), and the Java language at least gives us XML tools. Also, there are already
several languages ported to JVM [tu-berlin.de], including Perl and Python. So, from my eyes, everything that.NET/Mono offers seems to already be present for Java. The only thing missing would be a decent set of GUI components (Swing is bloated and slow!), and Microsoft's marketing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is there some way in which.NET/Mono is not just a reproduction of Java's efforts?
FYI, JDK 1.4 will include a COM bridge on Windows.
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild.NET/Java from the ground up. It would be much better if they joined the large ranks of open source developers working on projects surrounding the Java platform, for example by working on better Java integration with Gnome.
(While I can understand the distrust of Sun, it seems that Open Source works best when drawing from the larger base of the entire Unix community, including the commercial guys. Or in other words, the only organization that could succeed with a Java clone is Microsoft. And, heck, Sun might be closer to GPLing Java than we think.) --
You are right, there's no indication that the COM bridge will become part of the standard JDK.
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec...
The Unix community has traditionally built two plus of everything, which does lead to a certain strength through diversity, although it generally has lead to market confusion and stalemate. Meanwhile, Microsoft's position as a dominating single vendor means they can provide a very unified solution, even if it is not as "open" as what the Unix guys have. If Ximian does chose 'third way' between Java and.NET, I'm afraid it will do more to splitner the Unix/Java community than it will do anything to the MS solution.
Seeing that there are 'free software' implementaitons of Java and lots of GPL code available which surrounds the Java platform, it would be a shame if that was given up for a quixotic attempt to imitate Microsoft. --
If you read the article, you'd discover one of the major reasons Ximian has been working on.NET is that they plan to utilize the framework for their services, which incidentally, is a major part of their profit strategy. Evolution hackers at Ximian have mentioned that a drop-in replacement for Exchange is not out of the question, but at the moment, at least visible to public eyes, the primary areas of development that Ximian is working on are:
Evolution
Red Carpet and enhanced software delivery
Maintaining their Gnome distribution
Misc. Gnome hacking (maintenance, Gnome 2.0, Gnumeric, bonobo, etc.
Ximian Setup Tools
Services...
The services should be exciting. Picture things like mass network-wide, up-to-the-minute software delivery/installation, system configuration (cross platform) that's network-wide with configuration details separate from the client and possibly not even on the same machine. Software could be instaled, systems configured all by a client that's connected to a server somewhere at Ximian, for a fee. I could see tight integration between the Evolution suite and Ximian's services--store contacts, email, share files, across the network. Of course, the standard disclaimer: I don't work for Ximian. I just am stating some ideas that I think would be cool or that seem to be logical given what Ximian is publically working on.
I suspect that you misunderstand the big hubub about.NET. The interesting part of.NET is that it provides a method for two services running on remote devices to communicate information to each other (and provide distributed services in the process) while knowing absolutely nothing about the other device's architechture.
Way back when, if two services wanted to talk to each other, programmers had to open a socket and define the entire communications protocol fresh every time. Later, you had systems like CORBA, which allowed systems to invoke methods/functions remotely. More recently, Java has developed it's own system, Remote Method Invocation.
The problem is, that to use RMI, the other service has to be committed to Java as well. To use CORBA, it has to be committed to a CORBA compliant platform. To use.NET, all it really has to do is be able to receive HTTP/XML messages. Sure, the "message contract" has to be implemented on both sides, but that's still a damn sight easier than the raw socket communcations of the bad-old-days.
SOAP is a messaging protocol based on XML, and can be parsed in any language for which there are decent XML parsing tools: hence, the already extensive SOAP tools for Perl. It's already on the standards track [w3.org] with the W3C. There's already a good deal of support for SOAP in Perl [uwinnipeg.ca].
Committing to CORBA means using a CORBA-compliant development environment, which doesn't even take into account the differences between CORBA implementations. Committing to RMI basically means you're using Java, period. Support for SOAP in a programming language, on the other hand, is only a couple of steps past a decent XML library.
I suspect you haven't paid much attention to what Miguel has said about his
strategy. His goal isn't to make the best applications possible (although he
obviously desires to make his apps as good as possible, within the
constraints). His real goal is infiltration. That means that he
has to copy Microsoft, because he wants people to gradually ease
Gnome apps into places where Microsoft stuff has been running, one machine/app
at a time.
Don't try to make your mail server work with Exchange, make
your mail server work better than Exchange.
That's exactly the wrong thing to do, if you're using an infiltration
strategy. Anyone can make a better mail server than Exchange; it has probably
been done a dozen times. But if you want to infiltrate, then you make a
server that works like Exchange, so that you can replace an Exchange
server with your own stuff, and nobody notices. Then
the next week, you replace someone's Win+Outlook box with Linux+Evolution.
Then if no one makes any loud noises, you do a few more boxes after that.
Once you've got everyone running free alternatives to the MS stuff
so that they aren't on the MS upgrade/hostage cycle, then you
start to think about updating them to modern technology, better-than-Exchange
servers, etc. But you can only get away with that after infiltration is
heavy or complete.
(And no, I'm not really a big fan of this strategy. But I haven't tried it
either, and have nothing but a string of failures to show for all my attempts
to get my office to upgrade to better-than-MS stuff. So my opinion of not liking
the infiltration strategy, probably isn't worth much.;-)
Frankly I want to know what compelling components of.Net can't be performed with existent technologies such as Java, XML, etc..
The main feature that.Net has that Java et al doesn't have, is that lots of people are going to use.Net, regardless of how well/badly.Net works..Net's biggest feature is the MS marketing machine, and any other considerations are completely dwarfed.
I just don't seen any reason why we have to jump at something because Microsoft does it.
Because everyone else is going to jump at it. And what everyone else does is important because this is a popularity contest.
I'm not really sure that copying a marketing brochure counts as innovative. I think that I'd prefer to see some project starting from java, possibly with gcj (gjc?) as it's base. Then on a Linux, etc., platform one could freely use any language from gcc. Ditto on windows, via CygWin (XFree for CygWin is reported nearly ready, the XWindows edition of KDE is gpl, etc.)
If things are done right, then building on the foundation of tools that already exist we should have a good implementation of most of what MS-Net promises fairly quickly, with a historic trail that far predates the latest MS gee-whiz, and a clear record of prior art.
What would really help this would be if Sun donated, say, the JDK2.0 libraries, but I don't think that it's needed. Either Qt or GTK should be a good cross-platform library fairly soon, and the Glade GUI builder is a good start at a cross-platform IDE.... Package that together with a good editor (Glimmer would work, except for the way that it handles tabs), add make and you have a basic development environment. (Which would, it must be admitted, require either *nix or CygWin to run.)
The catch here is that there are a few parts that need more development. CygWin and XFree need to work together better. Preferably to the extent that KDE or Sawmill could run. XFCE just isn't sufficient. But the programs would need to run within a the standard window manager, whether on *nix, Windows, Mac, or other.
Is this innovative enough? It's based totally on projects already in motion.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
.NET is Microsoft's platform for XML Web services, the next generation of software that connects our world of information, devices and people in a unified, personalized way.
In other words,.NET is about XML Web Services. So of the items you listed, only #2 is.NET. The rest are supporting.NET, but are not.NET themselves. #1 is.NET development tools (Visual Studio.NET, the CLR, C#), #3 (Passport) is an instance of an XML Web Service, and #4 (Hailstorm) is both an instance of an XML Web Service and a platform for easily building XML Web Services.
Of course, just because those components are not.NET does not mean that suitable replacements will not need to be made if Ximian is really going to try to make a.NET "clone"
JPython allows you to inherit from Java classes, write Java classes which inherit from JPython, and access the standard Sun APIs.
Beans are, more or less, a joke. Any class which uses getXXX (or isXXX for boolean)/setXXX to access fields is technicall a Java Bean. While you can write a bunch of support classes to make your Java Beans configurable via a GUI environment, no one does this for non-GUI components (and the market for 3rd party Java UI widgets isn't exactly booming).
By the by, Enterprise Java Beans have virtually nothing to do with Java Beans.
Seriously, this is clearly hype without anything to back it up. What does "a LOT faster than Java" mean? UI code? Server code? XML parsing? FFT? Do you have numbers? Sample code?
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases. Now that's really a wide range of support!
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly? Does it send back sector information from the hard disks?
Two orders of magnitude. That's roughly how much faster a desktop app that I rewrote in C++ for my employer works these days.
Can you send me the original Java code? Absurdly slow Java code usually means a very bad programmer. I've written plenty of Java UI code and I've yet to see 10 seconds for a menu to appear.
I'll take that over half assed, broken JDBC drivers for Sybase any time. Does this language have a SINGLE API that's not broken?
Sun doesn't provide a Sybase driver. Sun provides a JDBC spec which driver writers can support. There are several companies which supply Sybase drivers (and I assume Sybase does, too). Blaming Sun for a broken Sybase database driver would be like blaming Microsoft because Dikatana sucked.
I won't even mention the quality of other Java related prdoucts such as servlet containers (yes I evaluated a number of them and they are all buggy as shit) and don't get me started on the dubious benefits of EJB with it's $15000/CPU rates.
I think you're looking at the wrong products.
Take a look at Resin. High quality, very fast, good support, $500/box licence for a servlet engine.
If you want EJBs, look at Orion. $1500/box for a fast EJB container that meets the J2EE spec fully. Oracle just dumped their own internally-developed J2EE app servers to licence and relabel Orion.
Both Orion and Resin are free for non-commercial use, including commercial development. You only have to pay when you deploy.
Oh, and Resin lets you download the source code, too. It's not quite Open Source (you can't ship modifications, I don't think), but I've yet to see the source for IIS on MS' web page...
There are Free (Speech and Beer) J2EE environments, but Resin and Orion are a good start in looking at quality J2EE servers.
Because microsofts 'innovations' revolve around world domination, not technology.
The whole.net idea isn't all that interesting in a technical sense, the idea has been out there for ages. Microsoft did not invent the idea of the ASP. Whatt's REALLY innovative is the business model they are going to try to achieve.
The oss/hobbyist (I don't mean the oss community are hobbyists, I just didn't want to exclude the hobyists) types simply don't try to take over the world.
If you want EJBs, look at Orion. $1500/box for a fast EJB container that meets the J2EE spec fully. Oracle just dumped their own internally-developed J2EE app servers to licence and relabel Orion.
Although Orion may meet the EJB spec it DOES NOT meet the J2EE spec fully. Having used it in a development environment let me tell you that it has the worst JMS support of any J2EE provider I have tried. We aren't just talking bad here, we are talking UNUSABLE. There are various elements of the spec that anre not implemented, or implemented so poorly that they might as well not be implemented (don't take my word for it - check out their own mailing list [orionserver.com]). Orion is fine for development, but when you want to go live go with BEA. The Oracle announcement was a shocker let me tell you, that they dumped their own J2EE solution to use Orion's says a lot about the spaghetti code Oracle had.;)
No one else got it? The link for "Mono" points to a Center for Disease Control (CDC) article on the Epstein-Barr Virus and Infectious Mononucleosis. Very funny IE SmartTag joke, guys.
I whole-heartedly agree with you that C#'s use of implicit boxing for value types is a really good idea. However, C# is not the first language that automatically converts between boxed and unboxed data representations. Functional languages (both dynamically typed and polymorphic statically typed) have been using similar techniques for decades. This is probably just semantic nitpicking, but your use of the word introduce might lead some folks to believe that Microsoft invented this technique.
I wonder if "MicroFUD" might get around the infringing problem, after all. There is a marked difference between MicroSoft (TM) and MicroFUD... of course if they wish to claim that it confuses the user, I'd love a copy of the trial transcript. >:)
"Also, there are already several languages ported to JVM, including Perl and Python."
... and Scheme. But that's not really the same as the Common Language Infrastructure. The CLI is much more transparent. You can just call a Python or C# function from your Perl program as you would a Perl function. Also, they all would have access to one standard library. It's easy (I think) to port a language to the CLR, but it's hard to port non-Java languages to the JVM (as in, I met a dude who did his thesis on porting Perl).
I'm not claiming to be a deeply entrenched member of either the Microsoft or Open Source/Free Software camps. I'm neither. I use whichever products suit my needs, whichever interest me, whichever prove to be a challenge or a pleasure in ways that I appreciate.
I use Windows 2000 as my primary web browsing/instant messenging platform, as well as for gaming and general computer use, and do you know what? It suits my purposes damn fine. I remember Windows as far back as version 2.0, I remember the hell that was 3.1, I remember the further hell that was original retail Win95. I remember the sham that was 98, I remember the joy of newfound Wintel stability that was NT. It's just a shame it didn't run any of my games.
Win2k, however, is great. I have never had a blue screen. Ever. I run my machines hard, I'm on them 10+ hours a day, every day. I update drivers regularly, I tinker with hardware, I am a general pain in the ass user. It just *works*. I know that's not the cool opinion to have around here, but it's true. At least it is for me.
I first used Linux in early 1996. A friend of mine on Powwow at the time had just discovered Linux and sent me individual diskette images for a distribution which, with the guidance of him in an IRC channel on another computer, I somehow installed.
It has been a fun toy at times, an unbelievably frustrating nuisance at others. There's little that can compare (well, for an extreme geek at least:P) with the joy one feels when he has just solved a problem that has plagued him for weeks. And a problem whose solution was useful and able to be applied to future problems, too; not the typical early windows "Oh, it's just not supported, I see" solutions. I am often blown away by the elegant and simple power of a program like vim, once mastered (everyone remembers the first time they sat at a vi window and just had NO idea what to do), the dedication of some in the Free/Open community to software for which they receive no monetary compensation for developing... on and on and on. It's a fantastic system. It also works well for the purposes I need it - I learned basic ASM, C, Perl, and a few other more arcane but interesting languages on Linux systems. I learned most all that I know of low-level computer functioning from making my Linux systems work.
What's the point of this long-winded ramble?
Linux and Windows are both suited for and geared to DIFFERENT THINGS.
*WHY* is this so hard for Open Source/Free Software advocates to accept? On one hand, we see people in forums such as this flame EVERYTHING that Microsoft does as absolute trash, absolute garbage, absolute filth, "oh haha Windows LOL BSOD 17x per day 20 second max uptime LOLOL WINDOWS SUX! LOL!" posts get modded up to +5, Funny, absolutely asinine hero worship posts about Linus or Tux or ESR or GNU dolls or *whoever* get modded up to +20 Insightful (Maybe Alan Cox Will Respond To My 40th Email If He Sees This)... yet... whenever Microsoft develops or announces a new technology, this same camp - almost without delay - is right on top of things, announcing an exact functional photocopy of the Microsoft product.
People make fun of Microsoft's use of the word "innovate" (asbestos suit defense mechanism: I do not think Microsoft is an innovative company, but that's not the point I'm trying to make) yet when pressed (as they were in a previous thread), can hardly name anything SUBSTANTIAL that has been innovated through the current Open Source/Free Software development system.
Yes, everything in the "early days" was much more open. That's all well and good. I mean what things *recently* that were "Open Source" from day one have been *truly* innovative? What new software has come out that knocks my pants off in a way I've never seen before?
I tried KDE once and it looked so much like Windows it was sickening. Same for GNOME. I remember the first and only time I installed RedHat, the default WM was using a Win95 theme, complete with pseudo-Start button.
I know this post is going to get modded down to -1, and perhaps rightfully so as I really haven't added anything to the conversation (just ranted a bit:), but next time you guys bust out the flamethrowers in an Anti-Windows thread just take a moment to think how much development effort is being put forth in the Linux community to emulate that very thing you hate.
Here's a tip for those who will shout "we're just going after market adoption in the same way the juggernaut is" - you will not beat Microsoft by nipping at their heels and re-implementing (albeit in a slightly different way) every single thing they do.
Create something *new*, create something *innovative*, create something *powerful*, and make it so that the layman can not only operate it but has a legitimate reason besides the intangible "more stable" argument to ACTUALLY USE IT, and you'll have a real battle on your hands.
Until then, I'm going to continue to use everything that suits my needs, and will shake my head when I see legions of the OSS faithful rush to reimplement something Microsoft has recently done when their development efforts would be better focused elsewhere.
Reimplementing a system that seems to be geared towards mass-production of resources (be it code, office documents, whatever) in a networked environment seems to be a bit of a stretch to me for proponents of an operating system that is just starting to come out of the stages where would-be users had to know the scan ranges of their monitors and chipsets of their video cards simply to get a graphical display.
FYI, JDK 1.4 will include a COM bridge on Windows.
Are you sure? As of JavaOne only a few weeks ago, the COM bridge was being released unsupported under the SCSL. It's kind of a kludgey hack, and it's only to allow COM to call Java, not the other way around. It gets hairy because every thread in every apartment in COM that wants to access a Java class has to create a separate instance of the Java runtime. It's not very practical, and from what I saw in the session I went to on it, many more developers were interested in the other way around - Java programs being able to call COM objects.
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
While Sun or Oracle or BEA might very well release a competing product, I don't expect they'll be open sourcing it or putting it directly into any spec, such as J2EE, although I might be wrong.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild.NET/Java from the ground up. It would be much better if they joined the large ranks of open source developers working on projects surrounding the Java platform, for example by working on better Java integration with Gnome.
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec. After all, GNOME only started over a licensing spat in the first place. Java might be "free enough" for a lot of us, but I certainly don't disrespect those for whom it isn't. I don't think Sun will be GPLing or otherwise releasing Java technology to the community at large any time soon. They make far too much money licensing their source to partners and charging for compatibility suite compliance.
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them
What exactly does it expand on?
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
No, actually you can write in one of the supported langauges [gotdotnet.com] on top of it, all of the useful ones of which have corresponding projects that target the JVM. Nothing I've seen about the CLI or the CLR suggests to me that it's got anything over Java. IL is just JVM bytecode warmed over. There's nothing about JVM bytecode that inherently ties it to the Java Language - just judge from the ports of Perl, Python, Scheme, etc. As long as a language can understand the Java object model, it can compile/reconstruct JVM bytecode, thus enabling it both inherit from Java libraries and allow inheritance from its own libraries. There's no particular reason, for example, why C# can't be compiled to JVM bytecode, since the object models are easily mappable between the two.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
Wow, now there's a feature, because those wrapper types are so painful to call -
Integer a = new Integer(int);
Never mind that explicit object encapsulation of primitives provides some uses of its own - protecting against accidental casting comes to mind.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
Yes, but all the data types you want to transfer between your 'raw' elements and your 'safe' code have to be part of the managed extensions Microsoft has introduced, so you're still going to end up rewriting large sections of code. Besides that, all of the overhead of JNI is still there, it's just abstracted by the runtime.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
So it's finally catching up to Java in this regard? Whoopee. I will admit that the abstraction layer that allows old COM objects to plug in to.NET seamlessly are nice, but there are similar projects [develop.com] to make it work for Java on Win32 platforms, too.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
No, actually they're enough to make any Java developer say "yawnnnnnn...."
Nobody ever said that we should be copying.NET from the ground up. What we should be doing is making it possible to talk to.NET's Web Services, which should be possible, since SOAP 1.1, WSDL, and UDDI are open protocols, and are probably going to make up the W3C XML-RPC spec when it's finished. The rest of it's fluff - I don't think anybody's going to worry about making Web Forms work on Linux, for example. C# and the CLR have nothing to do with Web Services - they're just an attempt to steal Java's thunder on WORA. The Java community is already working on Web Services APIs for Java - JAX-RPC and JAXM. That's where Open Source developers should be concentrating, too.
The most important thing besides getting tools that speak the wire protocols is creating something to compete with Microsoft for authentication services. This is where Microsoft expects to control the whole ball of wax. If they are the only authenticators, they can charge for every transaction. If Ximian is smart, they'll release an authentication framework as soon as they can, hopefully not long after Hailstorm is in the water (since before is likely a hopeless cause at this point).
"I think Passport...should simply be an open standard," Perens said.
Why in the world would we want Microsoft's idiosyncratic authentication mechanism to become a defacto standard for web services directories? Certainly not because of any demonstrated technical superority of said "standard" -- the Passport service has been down [yahoo.com] for the last couple of days. Sorry, MSDN subscribers!
It seems that developers who are truly interested in standards should colloborate on creating an authentication interface for SOAP. Of course, the standard would support pluggable implementations, and if people want to provide a Passport implementation of the interface, that is their business.
I look forward to seeing Ximian's piece. Right now, my favorite implementations of the ".NET" technologies are as follows:
Sorry to be so blunt here, but I'm going to be anway...
<flame on>
This isn't a war over desktop market share, dumbass. This is all about the servers. Microsoft develops.NET services to be deployed from Windows2000 or XP servers, and it doesn't matter if you can use them on MacOS X or Linux or *BSD or your Commodore64, because the server is still MS based and they still have control.
The simple fact of the matter is that BSD has much more of the server market than people think, and most people with any sense refuse to put Linux in mission-critical server positions. Linux is getting better, yes, but the BSDs are at the moment better suited to serious server work.
That said, it's highly likely that any software Ximian writes will be easily ported to BSD anyway, as long as they have competent coders working on it, because UNIX environments are relatively similar from an application standpoint anyway. However, don't underestimate the importance of BSD here because it has close to zero percent desktop market share; that's like saying that nobody will use Internet Explorer because there are much better FTP clients available.
<flame off>
It's java, Swing in particular. It's reasonably responisive half of the time but when it enters one of its mood swings (pun intended) it can take up to ten seconds for the UI to 'wake up' again. I notice that with JBuilder too. It's not our programmers who are at fault it's the runtime.
What you are describing sounds like you are doing some time-consuming stuff in the Swing thread. A common mistake - we have all been there. But certainly not the runtime's fault.
Sybase is a quality product and I don't understand why we have issues solely with the JDBC side of things.
doesn't Ximian do something a little more needed, like make a replacement for M$ Exchange?
.NET sounds cool, but it is still vaporware. There is no real need for it yet in the OSS/FS community. There is, IMHO, a definite need for an Exchange Server replacement, however.
If someone creates an open-source implementation of.NET that's compatible with Microsoft's, it will help make the.NET standard accepted, so Microsoft will sell
more of it and.NET equivalents (free or not) will die disappear even faster
Actually, I think one of the best ideas for free software propagation is to mimic proprietary stuff (like microsoft). If you can do the same thing, run on any operating system, and be open source and free (beer), you'll encourage people to switch to linux. And that makes you a killer app.
We are pre-announcing the announcment of a product that does not exist.
And I thought announcments were always a bit short on details. This is worse...
We apologize for the faults in the announcements. Those responsible have just been sacked.
...[some time later]...
We apologize once more for the faults in the announcements. Those responsible for announcing the announcement concerning the sacking of those responsible for announcing the announcement have also been sacked.
> Squeak's VM is written completely in Squeak for one thing,
From the website:
Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To
achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.
By having the VM written in the same language as the VM, you just lost a lot of performance.
There is a reason that Java's VM isn't written in Java (It's written in C)
Solaris and HP-UX also both have less market share on the ix86 than *BSD does (Free, Net, Open). And MacOS X is based on FreeBSD, so that could provide a quick porting route to OS X (if you count OS X as a BSD then *BSD has way more market share than GNU/Linux). And since you are competing with Windows NT/2k on the server side, you don't really need to target operating systems like Solaris (people won't be running.NET on there anyway). Using FreeBSD or GNU/Linux for a print and file server, a GNU/Linux system for the applications server, OpenBSD for the firewall (if ipf is as good as IPFilter), and Windows 4.x/5.x for the clients would probably end up being the common scenario (instead of everything Microsoft). Maybe even throw in a few GNU/Linux or FreeBSD clients. Youthful optimism? Maybe, but someone has to have some. For Ximians services, GNOME runs on FreeBSD (and others?) doesn't it?
.NET is more important because it doesn't exist, not less. If Free Software developers can get a version of.NET that is as good or better than the Microsoft version at the same time (or before) the Microsoft version is released, Microsoft may end up very screwed. Why get locked into one vendor / one OS when you could use one available from multiple vendors on many Operating Systems. If Ximian can get its.NET stuff out before Microsoft does, it will have a large advantage over Microsoft. Especially if it is better. Of course, this is assuming that Ximian will have clients for not only GNU/Linux but other UNICES (especially the BSDs) and (yes) Windows.
Mono because its for Monopoly, or the viral disease, or a forgien language for monkey. Just tack on.ORG and you have the ultimate head scratching inside project joke name!;-)
Especially the BSD's? Excuse me, but BSD probably has 0.0002 percent of the desktop market. Linux may only have 1% but that's still a hell of alot more. Solaris and HP-UX have way more desktop share!!.. hahah especially the BSD's. Keep dreaming. Best of luck.
I mean, BSD is great technology.. I just dont see how it's important for Ximian's service business.. Maybe you could enlighten me?
Now all that needs to happen is for SUN to get java standardized and allow Free clones...
As it stands currently you have to get virgin eyes to reverse-engineer the whole thing based on documentation only. You cant even copy the java header files!!.. even though they are self-evident.
gtk and gnome already run on BSD's, MacosX, Win9x, Solarid, HP-UX, AIX.. (The last three are members of the gnome foundation). UNIX is a portable environment. Ximian may not have the man power to keep up with a MacOSX port, but the source will most assuredly be there for enthusiasts to port.
I think the BSD folks will be more inclined to work with ximian than with MS... at least I hope so.
I still think this is a huge gamble for Microsoft which is by no means guaranteed to succeed.
.NET is a an all-encompasing mish-mash of new products and tools all designed to cater to this new "information service" economy that Microsoft thinks is the next big thing.
From a technical point of view, here's what I like in.NET
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them:
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
But I have a lot of reservations. First and foremost is that the word on the street is that the common runtime is four times slower than java. SOAP transfer data by text over any connection. Thats fine as long as you run over SSL between any two servers, but the whole idea of.NET is a point to point network of servers stepping between corporation bounds and countries. Thus, instintively I think: "how much thought to security have they given". Being unwilling to accept the propaganda, for this reason alone I've adopted a "wait and see" approach.
Trying to reproduce.NET on Linux is not something any one of the main players in our community should try to do alone. Imho, those who have the resources should try to hedge their bets a bit, but "wait and see", because, from what I've seen, I guarantee that the face of.NET tomorrow is going to radically change. If one thing is certain, Microsoft has absolutely no qualms about radically changing directions if they feel it's motivated.
Don't bet the house on something that isn't even guranteed to be the same in six months from now.
Microsoft may have a few technically saavy people, but when it comes to making stuff easy to use, microsoft is profoundly incompetant. Where the hell do you think clippy and adaptive menus came from? Remember, you don't have to make anything easy or usable if you're got marketshare and the ears of pointy-haired bosses. Unfortunately, GNOME (and KDE) has decided to adopt many of their standards, which is kind of like trying to pass a test by cheating off the stupidest kid in class. But at least the GNOME code is open and free so I have the option to fork and fix the crappy UI design (which I'm currently doing)..NET is scary because it is basically marketed as a solution to microsoft incompetance [slashdot.org] that will only breed more. And they will not be forthcoming with the code I need to correct their idiocies. I don't really see any other option but to destroy them. And anyone who copies them.
its a "platform" to build distributed applications and services on.
the goal of it is to make it very easy on the developer, and very seamless for the user.
there are many different peices to.NET, but most of the stuff I've seen is in the way of easy-to-use powerful development tools.
If you've seen the VS.NET betas, you may or may not have seen the new demo. Basically, making a web site or web service is now just as easy as making a silly windows app in VB 6 was. Except now your web service can be called from anywhere on the net, handles authentication for you, does something analagous to XML-RPC, does browser-capability negotiation, etc etc
...all without you having to worry about it... or write code to do it all for you..
so the upside is that for web site developers, they need not blow their time making half their html javascript to figure out how to change the mouse cursor on 234 different browsers... or you wont necessarily have to worry about what stupid sort of broken authentication scheme they have (and the silly password scheme/policy their website uses) if they happen to just say "this service uses your passport account"
similarly, it brings to the forefront the need to have a cross platform way to sharing objects, code, and semantics between otherwise anonymous and unknown servers "in the cloud". (wsdl/uddi)
building on that, and the heavy reliance on XML, makes it very easy to target an app/service at any device.. the "richness" of the end user experience depends only on what capabilities they understand in the objects presented...for instance if im just sending around XML data, my cell phone will present it in a useful way and so will somethign like MS Office. but my app sent out the same data both times.
if more nad more services start using passport, then users will want stronger passport integration. many developers are already very impressed with VS.NET, so perhaps it behooves the kde developers to investigate what can be done with the various qt/kde devtools w.r.t. developing retargetable services and applicatinos that can communicate with others via soap ?
So true. What this really means then is that the OSS community needs to come up with it's own OPEN standard version of this concept as opposed to a compatible OSS version of the actual ".net". Don't play Microsoft's game, rather beat them to the punch by releasing something REAL, SOONER that is OPEN. It's far more likely that institutions would make use of this if it allowed them to leverage the internet in the same manner but at a fraction of the cost. I think the best example is SAMBA, but without the MS part..
So, whatever the community decides to do with.NET, Microsoft wins. That's why Microsoft has "no objections" (sic) to third-party open-source.NET implementations, and that's why most open-source public figures look like they're sitting on hot coal when the issue pops up.
4th alternative...
Create an Open Source alternative to.NET and see how many people show up at the party. People are always ragging on OSS for being un-innovative and riding on the coattails of corporations, well what are y'all waiting for?
I find the GNOME mindset of copying Microsoft blindly to be somewhat bothersome. I understand the mindset of wanting to re-implement everything MS does (the "me too" syndrome), but oftentimes it seems like they don't consider whether Microsoft is doing things the right way.
Take.NET for example. One of the things it hinges on is SOAP/DCOM, which is essentially XML-based RPC. Now some in the open source community look at this and say "Hey! We can do that too! We have XML support! We have CORBA!", but I see this as a rash move. Without launching into a discussion of XML (which deserves its own rant), consider that RPC implementations are really a poor approach to network-based applications. To a newbie, RPC looks really cool, and it is in some ways a pretty neat-looking trick; just make method calls to another machine instead of your own! In practice however there is no golden rule stating that RPC, at least in current implementations, is the best way to write distributed applications.
A local method call and a network transaction are different things and should be treated as such. When you try to transparently layer one over the other, you end up blocking, which is a great way to write poor applications which use too many threads and end up tied in resource conflicts and deadlocks. Even if you can solve the non-trivial problem of synchronization, who wants all our apps spawning 2-3 threads to do trivial network operations? Isn't it the Linux community always complaining about bloat? The more you fill up your process table, the more your machine slows down.
Likewise, where is the error handling? If a CORBA routine returns failure, how can you be sure that the operation did not actually complete successfully on the receiving machine but that it failed to notify the caller due to network problems?
So anyway, I am all for Ximian et. al. providing an alternative to.NET, but I would prefer that they did it the right way, with actual network protocols which have actual asynchronous non-blocking interfaces.
That's just it..NET isn't a defacto standard yet. We need an OSS competitor from the beginning.
Why? Just because Microsoft is doing it does not mean we should follow along.
Frankly I want to know what compelling components of.Net can't be performed with existent technologies such as Java, XML, etc...
I am no expert so if some one want s to answer this I would like a legit answer. I just don't seen any reason why we have to jump at something because Microsoft does it. It is distracting to the movement.
Besides with the current broadband roll-out timetable, building server side applications/services as a main business is not smart right now,
not to mentions the issues of security when data is centralized.
That's just it..NET isn't a defacto standard yet. We need an OSS competitor from the beginning. It will be much easier for a company to move to Mono rather than move to.NET and then to Mono. We have the oportunity to get a competing product out early in the game and not have to play catchup. Who knows, maybe this will give OSS the boost it needs?
Swing is pretty damn fast under the 1.3.1 Hotspot Client VM on my 333MHz Linux box. I'm not exactly writing Hello World here either... the application I'm developing needs to be able to support dragging bitmapped images around on a JLayeredPane (Imagine moving layers in Photoshop). It also scales all the images when the window is resized. I had absolutely no idea Swing and the Java2D stuff was this fast before I started writing this app. And its running on a 3-year-old computer.
And please define bloated! I just can't imagine calling Swing "Bloated". Sure, there's a lot too it, but it all makes sense, works well together, and is considered by most folks to be the state of the art in GUI frameworks. I've also found it incredibly easy to learn.
Yes, I used to think Java was going to be a server-only thing and that "client side Java is dead." After working on a few projects with Swing & 1.3.1, that isn't the case anymore.
I don't mean to flame here, just had a minor problem with the one statement (I'm quite in agreement with most of whay you have to say) --
XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web Services!
I got a flyer from MS today that used the word XML about 500 times. Just thought I'd offer you all a brief summary:)
Okay, Microsoft, I'm tired of hearing about how the future of the world is XML Web Services. Yes, I think XML Web Services might be a really great idea. I don't think those of us with our heads screwed on correctly can imagine them to be the silver bullet MS does.
Seems the PR folks over there have learned that "if it says XML, it is good", and have run with it. Personally I think C# and the CLR are much more important than XML Web Services. So is Visual Basic-dot-NET, as I've heard rumors that Microsoft has actually made a noble attempt to clean up the evil that is Visual Basic-dot-6.
Can someone please explain to me if I'm missing the point on.NET though? I mean, all I understand is that Microsoft has three fairly cool technologies based on XML and Java-like-technologies (CLR, C#, XML services). They are grouping these together and calling them an exciting new platform, and brand-tying things together in an unheard of fashion even for Microsoft. Then we have a product "HailStorm" built on this technology, whose value I would measure with numbers less than 0. This seems like Windows DNA, take 2, only this time there actually is a little tiny bit of substance to the company-wide branding scheme.
Of course, to me, its really all academic. There's no way in hell I'm going to tie myself to the Windows platform after working so hard to break free. Especially with IBM and Sun putting Java exactly where all the BS hype in '95 said it was going to go and farther (No, its not in your golf clubs, but its on your server).
I just can't wait for the media to kill XML. Remember "Java is dead" or lately "Linux isn't working out?" Well, in six months, our trusty computer media will try to kill XML because its nice and trendy to do so, because it hasn't the saved world yet. While the XML technology is wonderful, I'll welcome this drivel, as XML is currently Microsoft's main buzzword. Hopefully they won't be able to adapt to the change quick enough. (And then of course in 3 years, XML will deliver on all its promises, and the media will turn around again:)) --
The idea being that Smalltalk (which is what Squeak is) was doing basically the same thing as Java and.NET 30 years ago with virtual machines and GUI primitives -- the only difference is that it took Apple to throw a metaphor on the GUI and Smalltalk lost out because it didn't evolve. It's actually a somewhat legitimate comment, even if it shows the person saying it to be a bit of a fanatic...
We've been lower priced copycats for sometime, and now they get to play catch-up to us by offering something already around for a higer price (why the hell would you change to tah?)
Whenever I see something like this, my hopes for the Open Source movement and community are dashed. How is this different from the "lower priced copycatting" that occurs now? Why does everyone feel the need to take a Microsoft idea and "implement it better"? What the community really needs is a NEW idea that Microsoft hasn't had! Not until this occurs will you see Linux and the other open source packages making inroads into corporate America. An example of this is Apache; it didn't start out to "emulate" Microsoft, they just wanted to build the best damn web-serving software around. And, for the most part, they succeeded. We need more new ideas and fewer "Outlook/.NET/etc..." clones.
One thing that I will concede is that Linux and the other Unices are in desperate need of a fully-featured productivity suite (Wordprocessing, presentations, spreadsheet, etc). Yes, yes, I know about StarOffice and Open Office and Abiword and Gnumeric... these are all decent packages, and I have real hope for OpenOffice. But the problem is that right now this is what is keeping many people from adopting Linux on the desktop.
If nobody creates an open-source.NET, Microsoft will be its only vendor and, because of their strong monopoly,.NET will be accepted reluctantly by everybody.
If someone creates an open-source implementation of.NET that's compatible with Microsoft's, it will help make the.NET standard accepted, so Microsoft will sell more of it and.NET equivalents (free or not) will die disappear even faster
If someone creates a broken implementation of.NET (or Microsoft breaks the standard afterward), people will fall back reluctantly on Microsoft's version (the original) and the open-source community's ability to create good software will be questioned by Microsoft and the Microsofties.
So, whatever the community decides to do with.NET, Microsoft wins. That's why Microsoft has "no objections" (sic) to third-party open-source.NET implementations, and that's why most open-source public figures look like they're sitting on hot coal when the issue pops up.
All in all,.NET is pure genius from Microsoft, a very subtle game of chicken with the community where they have no chance to lose because of they monopolistic stronghold. Pity for us...
What in the world would Ximian build their own.NET-compatible version of.NET for? If there is a need for a.NET-like service, then so be it, but dammit, dont copy Microsoft's implementation, grow something native for the unix world.
I think it behooves the Linux community as a whole to stop longing for compatibility with Microsoft (they obviously dont want it anyway) and build products that outclass theirs instead. Do you honestly think a non-bloated word processor couldnt be made that would beat out Word? Stop trying to support word's format and build your own wp app. (or maybe a better one already exists, I don't use wp apps, hooray for vi)
Exchange seems like another product that could be bested. Exchange is a total mess! Don't try to make your mail server work with Exchange, make your mail server work better than Exchange. Most Exchange features aren't used anyway, and just add to the bloat.
Why break your backs trying to play nice with.NET? I don't mean to invalidate compatibility for existing standards, but don't help usher in their new MS-centric efforts.
Would you rather support their way... or have your own way?
Why do people always seem to thing that Open Source = not for profit? If this was the case, Microsoft might actually have a valid point against using the GPL.
Even if Ximian makes a better product, adoption will be slow. For example, Sun's StarOffice has been free a while now, but I have only heard of one company that has deployed it as the standard office suite, meanwhile Microsoft can't sell Office fast enough. And if those companies did make Linux/StarOffice standard, they would have to teach everyone but the techies how to use it, which could quite possibly cost more than just buying the Mircosoft solution. It seems to me be that being computer literate is more closely equated to "Microsoft Literate". Although, if Linux was more widely adopted for mainstream use, Linux coders would probably be able to name their salary for developing internal company apps:)
C# code is compiled whereas most Java code is interpreted.
That's just wrong. Both C# and Java use an intermediate "virtual machine", which can get handled by an interpreter or a compiler. Sun's JDK mostly compiles, and its native code compiler is very good, better than Microsoft's C# native code compiler.
It would be interesting to see how GCC 3.0 compiled Java code would compare with C# code.
While quite usable, the GCC 3.0 Java compiler doesn't generate highly optimized code in my experience. Sun's JDK seems to beat it handily. The big advantage of GCC 3.0 for Java right now is that it generates more traditional executables that start up fast.
C#'s delegates kick ass - no equivalent in Java. (Java's interface impose a method name on the caller and a class hierarchy)
Both "C# delegates" and nested classes were considered for Java by the designers, and they decided to go with nested classes. Nested classes are more powerful and also give you independence from method names. (As an aside, "delegates" is a misnomer for what C# provides.)
Java's op codes prevent languages like C and C++ to target their VM, whereas.NET allows C and C++ programs to target their VM as well as efficiently as any other language.
Microsoft's runtime does not run C or C++, it runs "managed C++", which is a subset of C++; you could do the same on the JVM. They also integrated their C++ compiler with the Java runtime so that C++ code compiled to native code can interoperate with the Java runtime, kind of like what gcc and some commercial Java compilers offer for Java, but that has all the usual disadvantages of native code.
C#, CLR submitted as standard to EMCA. Java is proprietary. Sun may charge a fee for the use of their JVMs, libraries in the future.
That's a red herring. There is no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to comply with their ECMA submission; they may well add extensions. In fact, since their ECMA submission lacks most libraries real programs rely on, they already have. And unlike C#/.NET, there are already dozens of third party Java implementations, several of them open source. So, it doesn't matter what Sun does or doesn't do. Sun controls the "Java" trademark and their implementation, nothing more (and it is those that Microsoft ran afoul of).
Templates to be built into.NET virtual machine for greater efficiency and code sharing unlike GJ's template afterthought mechanism.
Right now, they are absent. It's also unclear whether there is any significant advantage to having them built in. Any implementation that wants to share a lot of code would essentially end up with an implementation similar to Java anyway.
C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
That idea predates both Java and C# by decades. The Java designers surely considered it.
Is it a good design decision to automate this? That is an open question. If you automate boxing/unboxing, most programmers won't know it's happening, and they will wonder while their code runs so slowly. It also leads to unobvious behavior when people try to use inheritance with number classes.
A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI).
Specific compilers do that for Java as well. GNU GCJ treats C++ and Java classes interchangeably, and some commercial compilers do (or have in the past) as well. The disadvantage is, of course, that if you rely on this, your code is now machine dependent and unsafe.
I completely agree. I think Ximian's decision to clone.NET is a mistake. Some specific points:
Lots of universities are teaching Java, and there are many programmers who know it.
Sun has delivered a very complete set of APIs for which we already know that they can be implemented on many different platforms;.NET/C# relies on a lot of Windows-specific APIs.
There are already lots of open source libraries for Java.
It looks like the embedded and handheld market has widely adopted Java already.
There already is a
gcc frontend [gnu.org] for Java, allowing you to compile standalone applications.
There are already several open source JIT compilers, including Kaffe [kaffe.org], Intel's Open Runtime Platform [intel.com], and OpenJIT [openjit.org] (the latter isn't open source compliant, but maybe could become so).
Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Sun's recent JDK's (1.3, 1.4) have excellent compilers and runtimes, rivaling C++ performance.
Also, while I think it would make sense for the Gnome project to use Java bindings to Gnome, I think Swing itself is getting a bad wrap. It's a well-designed toolkit that runs fine on reasonably fast machines. It's completely written in, and completely extensible in, Java. In a year or two, nobody will think twice about its speed. Most of the performance complaints about Swing are actually just the cost of the initial class loading and JIT compilation. Well-written Java programs structure that load process so that it doesn't bother users, but Sun is addressing these issues with each release.
There are no significant technical differences between Java and C# as languages. C# is neither harder nor easier to compile than Java. C# is not more expressive and it isn't less expressive. As languages, they are interchangeable. The question is: given these other considerations, which is the right choice? To me, the answer is pretty clearly Java, not C#.
But this is from The Other Side (Score:2)
Software for Software's sake (Score:2)
Re:Is KDE steering clear of this stuff? (Score:5)
> that, it looks like they're not getting involved
> in this stuff. Why is that?
We try to make KDE fit the needs of our users. I
haven't seen a single request for
users. In fact, I haven't seen a single person who
could tell me what it is, what it does, what
problem it tries to solve or for what kind of
things it should be used.
Feel free to fill me in on that.
Cheers,
Waldo
bastian@kde.org
Hee hee... (Score:2)
Re:Why... (Score:5)
Actually, that's exactly why it's needed - this is a shot at getting ahead of the game rather than always being behind the game. If the OSS/FS community could deploy a
It's a longshot - but if IBM, Sun, HP and the rest got behind a true open standard Web services framework, Microsoft wouldn't be able to deny its competitors an equal playing field -- which is exactly what it wants to do with
I think there are some Exchange replacements in the works, but I don't recall exactly what company is behind them.
Re:This is folly! (Score:5)
If microsoft does it, companies will use it, when lots of apps use
It's not about following along, it's more like we're flanking them. They want to make the internet proprietary, and if nearly every windows user goes along with them, they'll succede, and linux will be useless online. If we develop something to compete, they may not.
Not very well stated, but I'm tired, I'm sure you'll get the idea of what is meant, other posters have said similar things.
As to the point about java/xml, the other post in reply to your's says it very nicely... [aol]Me Too[/aol]
Re:Why... (Score:2)
It's not Free Software, but it uses free software components, eg., Exim, OpenLDAP, etc. And it has a very modest price compared to Exchange:
Compared to Exchange:
(yikes!)
How easy would it be to make Java port of .net ? (Score:3)
This would make sence, since Java already have huge installed base. Surely stuff like native code would be most likely impossible to implement, but if about 70% of
2) Is
Like word runs on user machine for efficiency reasons, but connects to MS server and calls one or two remote functions without which Word won't work, so that MS could charge user insane amount of money every 2 weeks. Or even worse, all user documents are encrypted, each time Word runs it downloads decryption key and encryption key for the next session - that way MS would keep user as hostage and he/she won't be able to switch to let's say OpenOffice.
IIRC, that was the goal behind
3) Anyone knows any reliable documentation on
Opinions are mine only and could change without notice.
Re:Linda (Score:2)
I'm also a bit unclear what you mean regarding asynchronous components. If I read you correctly, COM+ already supports this by way of queued components. It's simply implemented on top of message queues, which is a very good mechanism for asynchronous communication.
Re:we already have (Score:2)
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:3)
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/sharphsql.
From that articles point of view they are comparable with C# only being slightly slower in memory access.
It's difficult to say because Microsoft technically disallows published benchmarks.
As far as your concern regarding security of the data. Yes being XML it is sent essentionally as text. Even if it was binary data it still would not be safe without the use of SSL.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a company would wish to use SSL or perhaps a VPN or even a leased line. I also don't think it's unreasonable for Microsoft to make this assumption, certainly if they had implemented a different solution they would have been accused of subverting standards, whatever.
For my part, I really could care less about Web Services. What I'm most interested in is how they've improved the languages and the development environment for web apps, etc.
Re:Why... (Score:4)
Ahh the optimism of youth.
When is Mozilla releasing version 1.0?
Re:Bruce, what are you thinking? (Score:5)
As a general policy, our goal is not to destroy Microsoft, but to make a good partner of them. I'm not sure either one is possible, though :-)
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Now, JDK v1.4 fixes these problems. It's still in beta, but check it out. For client-side applications, performance feels, subjectively, native speed now.
I think Java is viable for client-side programs now. But lets not confuse
I welcome this. I will remain a J2EE programmer (check out JBoss--the best app server available, and it's Open Source, and Resin, for which a soon-to-be announced JVM integration with JBoss is coming soon). I will likely develop for Sun ONE. And I will likely integrate
Re:Swing is bloated and slow? Excuse me? (Score:2)
I agree wholeheartedly with you for pre-v1.4 stuff, though. Performance is lousy. But Java, as a language, is the Right Mix when it comes to object orientation, ease of use, rich library, well designed GUI (yes, I said it was well designed...not fast...but plz. check v1.4 for speed), and capabilities for RAD development. It rocks on the server, and I think it will soon be acceptable for internal application development (i.e. RAD dev).
Openmail is NOT a M$ exchange (Score:2)
StarOffice is ok..the word pro (Score:2)
Re:hrm... (Score:2)
Seattle, WA (AP) - Microsoft corporation has filed a lawsuit against the distributers of MicrosoftFUD. Claiming that MicrosoftFUD is a cancer, and a blemish against Microsoft's good name, Chairman Bill Gates announced to a packed conference room that this MicrosoftFUD must be stopped. "Second rate open source software must not be allowed to besmirch the good name of Microsoft. MicrosoftFUD is just a poor quality product promoted by a bunch of weed smoking hippies", said Gates, adding that no sane business would consider running on top of the MicrosoftFUD platform.
Re:hrm... (Score:5)
Seattle, WA (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said today that MicrosoftFUD was a cancer, and bad for business. After a round of snickers in the conference room, the obviously flustered billionaire shouted "MicrosoftFUD sucks!" loudly and stormed out of the room."
Re:Why... (Score:3)
MS has already announced that they are going to port .NET to BSD. Keep in mind that BSD still has a few technical advantages over Linux as a server OS, and it has a few really big users (Yahoo! for example). So, there's a lot of money involved. It makes for Ximian to want to grab that share of support dollars.
For this same reason (BSD as server), BSD support becomes important for expanding Mono's mindshare. Knowing MS, they will probably introduce certain "features" into .NET to make it completely and utterly incompatible with Mono. That means that any company that is using BSD for serving applications is going to have to choose between Mono and .NET for compatibility. With MS behind .NET, Mono is going to have a hard time in that market space, even if Mono is a superior product. With no BSD support for Mono, the choice is automatic.
Ximian can't afford to screw around on this. If they get Mono right, it could be a company maker.
Java? (Score:5)
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that Java already gives us a virtual machine (for compile-once-run-anywhere), Enterprise already gives us CORBA (as opposed to COM), and the Java language at least gives us XML tools. Also, there are already several languages ported to JVM [tu-berlin.de], including Perl and Python. So, from my eyes, everything that .NET/Mono offers seems to already be present for Java. The only thing missing would be a decent set of GUI components (Swing is bloated and slow!), and Microsoft's marketing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is there some way in which .NET/Mono is not just a reproduction of Java's efforts?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:2)
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild
(While I can understand the distrust of Sun, it seems that Open Source works best when drawing from the larger base of the entire Unix community, including the commercial guys. Or in other words, the only organization that could succeed with a Java clone is Microsoft. And, heck, Sun might be closer to GPLing Java than we think.)
--
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:2)
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec
The Unix community has traditionally built two plus of everything, which does lead to a certain strength through diversity, although it generally has lead to market confusion and stalemate. Meanwhile, Microsoft's position as a dominating single vendor means they can provide a very unified solution, even if it is not as "open" as what the Unix guys have. If Ximian does chose 'third way' between Java and
Seeing that there are 'free software' implementaitons of Java and lots of GPL code available which surrounds the Java platform, it would be a shame if that was given up for a quixotic attempt to imitate Microsoft.
--
Re:Bruce, what are you thinking? (Score:2)
You'd force yourself to take vacation without pay?
(ducking, dodging, spinning, parrying, thrusting, jabbing, etc, etc, etc)
The answer is pretty simple. (Score:2)
The services should be exciting. Picture things like mass network-wide, up-to-the-minute software delivery/installation, system configuration (cross platform) that's network-wide with configuration details separate from the client and possibly not even on the same machine. Software could be instaled, systems configured all by a client that's connected to a server somewhere at Ximian, for a fee. I could see tight integration between the Evolution suite and Ximian's services--store contacts, email, share files, across the network. Of course, the standard disclaimer: I don't work for Ximian. I just am stating some ideas that I think would be cool or that seem to be logical given what Ximian is publically working on.
Missing the point. (Score:2)
I suspect that you misunderstand the big hubub about .NET. The interesting part of .NET is that it provides a method for two services running on remote devices to communicate information to each other (and provide distributed services in the process) while knowing absolutely nothing about the other device's architechture.
Way back when, if two services wanted to talk to each other, programmers had to open a socket and define the entire communications protocol fresh every time. Later, you had systems like CORBA, which allowed systems to invoke methods/functions remotely. More recently, Java has developed it's own system, Remote Method Invocation.
The problem is, that to use RMI, the other service has to be committed to Java as well. To use CORBA, it has to be committed to a CORBA compliant platform. To use .NET, all it really has to do is be able to receive HTTP/XML messages. Sure, the "message contract" has to be implemented on both sides, but that's still a damn sight easier than the raw socket communcations of the bad-old-days.
Re:Missing the point. (Score:3)
Sorry - I have to disagree.
SOAP is a messaging protocol based on XML, and can be parsed in any language for which there are decent XML parsing tools: hence, the already extensive SOAP tools for Perl. It's already on the standards track [w3.org] with the W3C. There's already a good deal of support for SOAP in Perl [uwinnipeg.ca].
Committing to CORBA means using a CORBA-compliant development environment, which doesn't even take into account the differences between CORBA implementations. Committing to RMI basically means you're using Java, period. Support for SOAP in a programming language, on the other hand, is only a couple of steps past a decent XML library.
Re:Why let MS write the rules here? (Score:2)
I suspect you haven't paid much attention to what Miguel has said about his strategy. His goal isn't to make the best applications possible (although he obviously desires to make his apps as good as possible, within the constraints). His real goal is infiltration. That means that he has to copy Microsoft, because he wants people to gradually ease Gnome apps into places where Microsoft stuff has been running, one machine/app at a time.
That's exactly the wrong thing to do, if you're using an infiltration strategy. Anyone can make a better mail server than Exchange; it has probably been done a dozen times. But if you want to infiltrate, then you make a server that works like Exchange, so that you can replace an Exchange server with your own stuff, and nobody notices. Then the next week, you replace someone's Win+Outlook box with Linux+Evolution. Then if no one makes any loud noises, you do a few more boxes after that.
Once you've got everyone running free alternatives to the MS stuff so that they aren't on the MS upgrade/hostage cycle, then you start to think about updating them to modern technology, better-than-Exchange servers, etc. But you can only get away with that after infiltration is heavy or complete.
(And no, I'm not really a big fan of this strategy. But I haven't tried it either, and have nothing but a string of failures to show for all my attempts to get my office to upgrade to better-than-MS stuff. So my opinion of not liking the infiltration strategy, probably isn't worth much. ;-)
---
Re:This is folly! (Score:2)
The main feature that .Net has that Java et al doesn't have, is that lots of people are going to use .Net, regardless of how well/badly .Net works. .Net's biggest feature is the MS marketing machine, and any other considerations are completely dwarfed.
Because everyone else is going to jump at it. And what everyone else does is important because this is a popularity contest.
---
Re:4th alternative (Score:3)
If things are done right, then building on the foundation of tools that already exist we should have a good implementation of most of what MS-Net promises fairly quickly, with a historic trail that far predates the latest MS gee-whiz, and a clear record of prior art.
What would really help this would be if Sun donated, say, the JDK2.0 libraries, but I don't think that it's needed. Either Qt or GTK should be a good cross-platform library fairly soon, and the Glade GUI builder is a good start at a cross-platform IDE.
The catch here is that there are a few parts that need more development. CygWin and XFree need to work together better. Preferably to the extent that KDE or Sawmill could run. XFCE just isn't sufficient. But the programs would need to run within a the standard window manager, whether on *nix, Windows, Mac, or other.
Is this innovative enough? It's based totally on projects already in motion.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:no, sorry, that's not quite true (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
--
Re:huh? (Score:2)
--
Re:Competing with an undefined target (Score:2)
From http://www.microsoft.com/net [microsoft.com]
In other words,Of course, just because those components are not .NET does not mean that suitable replacements will not need to be made if Ximian is really going to try to make a .NET "clone"
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Beans are, more or less, a joke. Any class which uses getXXX (or isXXX for boolean)/setXXX to access fields is technicall a Java Bean. While you can write a bunch of support classes to make your Java Beans configurable via a GUI environment, no one does this for non-GUI components (and the market for 3rd party Java UI widgets isn't exactly booming).
By the by, Enterprise Java Beans have virtually nothing to do with Java Beans.
-jon
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Seriously, this is clearly hype without anything to back it up. What does "a LOT faster than Java" mean? UI code? Server code? XML parsing? FFT? Do you have numbers? Sample code?
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases. Now that's really a wide range of support!
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly? Does it send back sector information from the hard disks?
MS fanboys (or trolls) are always so amusing...
-jon
Re:Java? (Score:5)
Can you send me the original Java code? Absurdly slow Java code usually means a very bad programmer. I've written plenty of Java UI code and I've yet to see 10 seconds for a menu to appear.
I'll take that over half assed, broken JDBC drivers for Sybase any time. Does this language have a SINGLE API that's not broken?
Sun doesn't provide a Sybase driver. Sun provides a JDBC spec which driver writers can support. There are several companies which supply Sybase drivers (and I assume Sybase does, too). Blaming Sun for a broken Sybase database driver would be like blaming Microsoft because Dikatana sucked.
I won't even mention the quality of other Java related prdoucts such as servlet containers (yes I evaluated a number of them and they are all buggy as shit) and don't get me started on the dubious benefits of EJB with it's $15000/CPU rates.
I think you're looking at the wrong products.
Take a look at Resin. High quality, very fast, good support, $500/box licence for a servlet engine.
If you want EJBs, look at Orion. $1500/box for a fast EJB container that meets the J2EE spec fully. Oracle just dumped their own internally-developed J2EE app servers to licence and relabel Orion.
Both Orion and Resin are free for non-commercial use, including commercial development. You only have to pay when you deploy.
Oh, and Resin lets you download the source code, too. It's not quite Open Source (you can't ship modifications, I don't think), but I've yet to see the source for IIS on MS' web page...
There are Free (Speech and Beer) J2EE environments, but Resin and Orion are a good start in looking at quality J2EE servers.
-jon
Announcment (Score:4)
And I thought announcments were always a bit short on details. This is worse...
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:2)
Given Microsoft's track record, the likely answer is "nowhere near enough".
--
Funny.. (Score:2)
monorail, mononucleosis, monotonous, monotone, etc.
Kind of made sense to me that way.
Of course, it DOES mean monkey in Spanish.... so...
Seriously, though.. (Score:3)
The whole
The oss/hobbyist (I don't mean the oss community are hobbyists, I just didn't want to exclude the hobyists) types simply don't try to take over the world.
Lots of Support! (Score:2)
would be happy to support it in the way we've supported a lot of other initiatives to support
choice."
Hey, I can support that!
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Although Orion may meet the EJB spec it DOES NOT meet the J2EE spec fully. Having used it in a development environment let me tell you that it has the worst JMS support of any J2EE provider I have tried. We aren't just talking bad here, we are talking UNUSABLE. There are various elements of the spec that anre not implemented, or implemented so poorly that they might as well not be implemented (don't take my word for it - check out their own mailing list [orionserver.com]). Orion is fine for development, but when you want to go live go with BEA. The Oracle announcement was a shocker let me tell you, that they dumped their own J2EE solution to use Orion's says a lot about the spaghetti code Oracle had.
smarttags joke? (Score:2)
Wait a second, I viewed this page in IE...
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:2)
I whole-heartedly agree with you that C#'s use of implicit boxing for value types is a really good idea. However, C# is not the first language that automatically converts between boxed and unboxed data representations. Functional languages (both dynamically typed and polymorphic statically typed) have been using similar techniques for decades. This is probably just semantic nitpicking, but your use of the word introduce might lead some folks to believe that Microsoft invented this technique.
Re:hrm... (Score:2)
Re:Ironic choice of names... (Score:3)
-Aaron
Re: (Score:2)
Re:hrm... (Score:2)
seriously folks... can we stop with the cutesy recusive acronyms and G- or K- named projects...
its a bit chilidish
Re:Java? (Score:3)
... and Scheme. But that's not really the same as the Common Language Infrastructure. The CLI is much more transparent. You can just call a Python or C# function from your Perl program as you would a Perl function. Also, they all would have access to one standard library. It's easy (I think) to port a language to the CLR, but it's hard to port non-Java languages to the JVM (as in, I met a dude who did his thesis on porting Perl).
An outsider's perspective... (Score:2)
I use Windows 2000 as my primary web browsing/instant messenging platform, as well as for gaming and general computer use, and do you know what? It suits my purposes damn fine. I remember Windows as far back as version 2.0, I remember the hell that was 3.1, I remember the further hell that was original retail Win95. I remember the sham that was 98, I remember the joy of newfound Wintel stability that was NT. It's just a shame it didn't run any of my games.
Win2k, however, is great. I have never had a blue screen. Ever. I run my machines hard, I'm on them 10+ hours a day, every day. I update drivers regularly, I tinker with hardware, I am a general pain in the ass user. It just *works*. I know that's not the cool opinion to have around here, but it's true. At least it is for me.
I first used Linux in early 1996. A friend of mine on Powwow at the time had just discovered Linux and sent me individual diskette images for a distribution which, with the guidance of him in an IRC channel on another computer, I somehow installed.
It has been a fun toy at times, an unbelievably frustrating nuisance at others. There's little that can compare (well, for an extreme geek at least
What's the point of this long-winded ramble?
Linux and Windows are both suited for and geared to DIFFERENT THINGS.
*WHY* is this so hard for Open Source/Free Software advocates to accept? On one hand, we see people in forums such as this flame EVERYTHING that Microsoft does as absolute trash, absolute garbage, absolute filth, "oh haha Windows LOL BSOD 17x per day 20 second max uptime LOLOL WINDOWS SUX! LOL!" posts get modded up to +5, Funny, absolutely asinine hero worship posts about Linus or Tux or ESR or GNU dolls or *whoever* get modded up to +20 Insightful (Maybe Alan Cox Will Respond To My 40th Email If He Sees This)... yet... whenever Microsoft develops or announces a new technology, this same camp - almost without delay - is right on top of things, announcing an exact functional photocopy of the Microsoft product.
People make fun of Microsoft's use of the word "innovate" (asbestos suit defense mechanism: I do not think Microsoft is an innovative company, but that's not the point I'm trying to make) yet when pressed (as they were in a previous thread), can hardly name anything SUBSTANTIAL that has been innovated through the current Open Source/Free Software development system.
Yes, everything in the "early days" was much more open. That's all well and good. I mean what things *recently* that were "Open Source" from day one have been *truly* innovative? What new software has come out that knocks my pants off in a way I've never seen before?
I tried KDE once and it looked so much like Windows it was sickening. Same for GNOME. I remember the first and only time I installed RedHat, the default WM was using a Win95 theme, complete with pseudo-Start button.
I know this post is going to get modded down to -1, and perhaps rightfully so as I really haven't added anything to the conversation (just ranted a bit
Here's a tip for those who will shout "we're just going after market adoption in the same way the juggernaut is" - you will not beat Microsoft by nipping at their heels and re-implementing (albeit in a slightly different way) every single thing they do.
Create something *new*, create something *innovative*, create something *powerful*, and make it so that the layman can not only operate it but has a legitimate reason besides the intangible "more stable" argument to ACTUALLY USE IT, and you'll have a real battle on your hands.
Until then, I'm going to continue to use everything that suits my needs, and will shake my head when I see legions of the OSS faithful rush to reimplement something Microsoft has recently done when their development efforts would be better focused elsewhere.
Reimplementing a system that seems to be geared towards mass-production of resources (be it code, office documents, whatever) in a networked environment seems to be a bit of a stretch to me for proponents of an operating system that is just starting to come out of the stages where would-be users had to know the scan ranges of their monitors and chipsets of their video cards simply to get a graphical display.
Re:Ironic choice of names... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:2)
FYI, JDK 1.4 will include a COM bridge on Windows.
Are you sure? As of JavaOne only a few weeks ago, the COM bridge was being released unsupported under the SCSL. It's kind of a kludgey hack, and it's only to allow COM to call Java, not the other way around. It gets hairy because every thread in every apartment in COM that wants to access a Java class has to create a separate instance of the Java runtime. It's not very practical, and from what I saw in the session I went to on it, many more developers were interested in the other way around - Java programs being able to call COM objects.
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
While Sun or Oracle or BEA might very well release a competing product, I don't expect they'll be open sourcing it or putting it directly into any spec, such as J2EE, although I might be wrong.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild .NET/Java from the ground up. It would be much better if they joined the large ranks of open source developers working on projects surrounding the Java platform, for example by working on better Java integration with Gnome.
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec. After all, GNOME only started over a licensing spat in the first place. Java might be "free enough" for a lot of us, but I certainly don't disrespect those for whom it isn't. I don't think Sun will be GPLing or otherwise releasing Java technology to the community at large any time soon. They make far too much money licensing their source to partners and charging for compatibility suite compliance.
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:3)
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them
What exactly does it expand on?
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
No, actually you can write in one of the supported langauges [gotdotnet.com] on top of it, all of the useful ones of which have corresponding projects that target the JVM. Nothing I've seen about the CLI or the CLR suggests to me that it's got anything over Java. IL is just JVM bytecode warmed over. There's nothing about JVM bytecode that inherently ties it to the Java Language - just judge from the ports of Perl, Python, Scheme, etc. As long as a language can understand the Java object model, it can compile/reconstruct JVM bytecode, thus enabling it both inherit from Java libraries and allow inheritance from its own libraries. There's no particular reason, for example, why C# can't be compiled to JVM bytecode, since the object models are easily mappable between the two.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
Wow, now there's a feature, because those wrapper types are so painful to call -
Integer a = new Integer(int);Never mind that explicit object encapsulation of primitives provides some uses of its own - protecting against accidental casting comes to mind.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
Yes, but all the data types you want to transfer between your 'raw' elements and your 'safe' code have to be part of the managed extensions Microsoft has introduced, so you're still going to end up rewriting large sections of code. Besides that, all of the overhead of JNI is still there, it's just abstracted by the runtime.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
So it's finally catching up to Java in this regard? Whoopee. I will admit that the abstraction layer that allows old COM objects to plug in to .NET seamlessly are nice, but there are similar projects [develop.com] to make it work for Java on Win32 platforms, too.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
No, actually they're enough to make any Java developer say "yawnnnnnn...."
Nobody ever said that we should be copying .NET from the ground up. What we should be doing is making it possible to talk to .NET's Web Services, which should be possible, since SOAP 1.1, WSDL, and UDDI are open protocols, and are probably going to make up the W3C XML-RPC spec when it's finished. The rest of it's fluff - I don't think anybody's going to worry about making Web Forms work on Linux, for example. C# and the CLR have nothing to do with Web Services - they're just an attempt to steal Java's thunder on WORA. The Java community is already working on Web Services APIs for Java - JAX-RPC and JAXM. That's where Open Source developers should be concentrating, too.
The most important thing besides getting tools that speak the wire protocols is creating something to compete with Microsoft for authentication services. This is where Microsoft expects to control the whole ball of wax. If they are the only authenticators, they can charge for every transaction. If Ximian is smart, they'll release an authentication framework as soon as they can, hopefully not long after Hailstorm is in the water (since before is likely a hopeless cause at this point).
Mono is obsolete (Score:4)
-- Pure FTP server [pureftpd.org] - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
Haw! (Score:2)
:)
- - - - -
Bruce, what are you thinking? (Score:2)
Why in the world would we want Microsoft's idiosyncratic authentication mechanism to become a defacto standard for web services directories? Certainly not because of any demonstrated technical superority of said "standard" -- the Passport service has been down [yahoo.com] for the last couple of days. Sorry, MSDN subscribers!
It seems that developers who are truly interested in standards should colloborate on creating an authentication interface for SOAP. Of course, the standard would support pluggable implementations, and if people want to provide a Passport implementation of the interface, that is their business.
I look forward to seeing Ximian's piece. Right now, my favorite implementations of the ".NET" technologies are as follows:
SOAP: Apache toolkit [apache.org]
WDSL: Alphaworks toolkit [ibm.com]
Sun will have their own implementation [sun.com] as well, but it is still very early stage.
Re:Ironic choice of names... (Score:2)
Re:Why... (Score:2)
<flame on>
This isn't a war over desktop market share, dumbass. This is all about the servers. Microsoft develops
The simple fact of the matter is that BSD has much more of the server market than people think, and most people with any sense refuse to put Linux in mission-critical server positions. Linux is getting better, yes, but the BSDs are at the moment better suited to serious server work.
That said, it's highly likely that any software Ximian writes will be easily ported to BSD anyway, as long as they have competent coders working on it, because UNIX environments are relatively similar from an application standpoint anyway. However, don't underestimate the importance of BSD here because it has close to zero percent desktop market share; that's like saying that nobody will use Internet Explorer because there are much better FTP clients available.
<flame off>
Re:Java? (Score:2)
What you are describing sounds like you are doing some time-consuming stuff in the Swing thread. A common mistake - we have all been there. But certainly not the runtime's fault.
Sybase is a quality product and I don't understand why we have issues solely with the JDBC side of things.
Maybe their Java programmers suck.
Re:She's a witch! Burn her! (Score:2)
//rdj
Why... (Score:5)
.NET sounds cool, but it is still vaporware. There is no real need for it yet in the OSS/FS community. There is, IMHO, a definite need for an Exchange Server replacement, however.
Just a thought.
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Re:.NET cloned or not, Microsoft wins (Score:2)
Actually, I think one of the best ideas for free software propagation is to mimic proprietary stuff (like microsoft). If you can do the same thing, run on any operating system, and be open source and free (beer), you'll encourage people to switch to linux. And that makes you a killer app.
Re:Announcment (Score:4)
We apologize for the faults in the announcements. Those responsible have just been sacked.
We apologize once more for the faults in the announcements. Those responsible for announcing the announcement concerning the sacking of those responsible for announcing the announcement have also been sacked.
Mike,
What language the VM is written in makes a dif (Score:2)
From the website:
By having the VM written in the same language as the VM, you just lost a lot of performance.
There is a reason that Java's VM isn't written in Java (It's written in C)
Oh Great... (Score:5)
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Re:Why... (Score:2)
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Re:Why... (Score:3)
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Mono.ORG! Brilliant! (Score:2)
Re:Why... (Score:2)
I mean, BSD is great technology.. I just dont see how it's important for Ximian's service business.. Maybe you could enlighten me?
Re:Commercial Port To Java (Score:2)
As it stands currently you have to get virgin eyes to reverse-engineer the whole thing based on documentation only. You cant even copy the java header files!!.. even though they are self-evident.
Re:Why... (Score:2)
I think the BSD folks will be more inclined to work with ximian than with MS... at least I hope so.
Interesting .NET technologies (Score:5)
.NET is a an all-encompasing mish-mash of new products and tools all designed to cater to this new "information service" economy that Microsoft thinks is the next big thing.
From a technical point of view, here's what I like in
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them:
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
But I have a lot of reservations. First and foremost is that the word on the street is that the common runtime is four times slower than java. SOAP transfer data by text over any connection. Thats fine as long as you run over SSL between any two servers, but the whole idea of
Trying to reproduce
Don't bet the house on something that isn't even guranteed to be the same in six months from now.
Re:Bruce, what are you thinking? (Score:2)
Re:hrm... (Score:2)
Well it's going to be pretty easy to make fun of it when it's named after a disease! Maybe the GPL really is like a virus.
But really, if it's an open-source .NET, shouldn't it be called .ORG?
- j
Como jabon y me baño en sopa (Score:2)
Surely the phrase, "Como jabon y me baño en sopa" isn't lost on MDI...
Re:Is KDE steering clear of this stuff? (Score:2)
its a "platform" to build distributed applications and services on.
the goal of it is to make it very easy on the developer, and very seamless for the user.
there are many different peices to
If you've seen the VS.NET betas, you may or may not have seen the new demo. Basically, making a web site or web service is now just as easy as making a silly windows app in VB 6 was. Except now your web service can be called from anywhere on the net, handles authentication for you, does something analagous to XML-RPC, does browser-capability negotiation, etc etc
...all without you having to worry about it... or write code to do it all for you..
so the upside is that for web site developers, they need not blow their time making half their html javascript to figure out how to change the mouse cursor on 234 different browsers... or you wont necessarily have to worry about what stupid sort of broken authentication scheme they have (and the silly password scheme/policy their website uses) if they happen to just say "this service uses your passport account"
similarly, it brings to the forefront the need to have a cross platform way to sharing objects, code, and semantics between otherwise anonymous and unknown servers "in the cloud". (wsdl/uddi)
building on that, and the heavy reliance on XML, makes it very easy to target an app/service at any device.. the "richness" of the end user experience depends only on what capabilities they understand in the objects presented...for instance if im just sending around XML data, my cell phone will present it in a useful way and so will somethign like MS Office. but my app sent out the same data both times.
if more nad more services start using passport, then users will want stronger passport integration. many developers are already very impressed with VS.NET, so perhaps it behooves the kde developers to investigate what can be done with the various qt/kde devtools w.r.t. developing retargetable services and applicatinos that can communicate with others via soap ?
just some thoughts..
Re:.NET cloned or not, Microsoft wins (Score:3)
4th alternative (Score:3)
4th alternative...
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CORBA reeks (Score:4)
Take
A local method call and a network transaction are different things and should be treated as such. When you try to transparently layer one over the other, you end up blocking, which is a great way to write poor applications which use too many threads and end up tied in resource conflicts and deadlocks. Even if you can solve the non-trivial problem of synchronization, who wants all our apps spawning 2-3 threads to do trivial network operations? Isn't it the Linux community always complaining about bloat? The more you fill up your process table, the more your machine slows down.
Likewise, where is the error handling? If a CORBA routine returns failure, how can you be sure that the operation did not actually complete successfully on the receiving machine but that it failed to notify the caller due to network problems?
So anyway, I am all for Ximian et. al. providing an alternative to
This is folly! (Score:5)
Why? Just because Microsoft is doing it does not mean we should follow along.
Frankly I want to know what compelling components of .Net can't be performed with existent technologies such as Java, XML, etc...
I am no expert so if some one want s to answer this I would like a legit answer. I just don't seen any reason why we have to jump at something because Microsoft does it. It is distracting to the movement.
Besides with the current broadband roll-out timetable, building server side applications/services as a main business is not smart right now, not to mentions the issues of security when data is centralized.
Re:Why... (Score:5)
--
Swing is bloated and slow? Excuse me? (Score:3)
And please define bloated! I just can't imagine calling Swing "Bloated". Sure, there's a lot too it, but it all makes sense, works well together, and is considered by most folks to be the state of the art in GUI frameworks. I've also found it incredibly easy to learn.
Yes, I used to think Java was going to be a server-only thing and that "client side Java is dead." After working on a few projects with Swing & 1.3.1, that isn't the case anymore.
I don't mean to flame here, just had a minor problem with the one statement (I'm quite in agreement with most of whay you have to say)
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XML Web Services! XML Web Services! XML Web... (Score:4)
I got a flyer from MS today that used the word XML about 500 times. Just thought I'd offer you all a brief summary
Okay, Microsoft, I'm tired of hearing about how the future of the world is XML Web Services. Yes, I think XML Web Services might be a really great idea. I don't think those of us with our heads screwed on correctly can imagine them to be the silver bullet MS does.
Seems the PR folks over there have learned that "if it says XML, it is good", and have run with it. Personally I think C# and the CLR are much more important than XML Web Services. So is Visual Basic-dot-NET, as I've heard rumors that Microsoft has actually made a noble attempt to clean up the evil that is Visual Basic-dot-6.
Can someone please explain to me if I'm missing the point on
Of course, to me, its really all academic. There's no way in hell I'm going to tie myself to the Windows platform after working so hard to break free. Especially with IBM and Sun putting Java exactly where all the BS hype in '95 said it was going to go and farther (No, its not in your golf clubs, but its on your server).
I just can't wait for the media to kill XML. Remember "Java is dead" or lately "Linux isn't working out?" Well, in six months, our trusty computer media will try to kill XML because its nice and trendy to do so, because it hasn't the saved world yet. While the XML technology is wonderful, I'll welcome this drivel, as XML is currently Microsoft's main buzzword. Hopefully they won't be able to adapt to the change quick enough. (And then of course in 3 years, XML will deliver on all its promises, and the media will turn around again
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Re:There is already open source competition for .N (Score:4)
/Brian
Re:Why... (Score:3)
One thing that I will concede is that Linux and the other Unices are in desperate need of a fully-featured productivity suite (Wordprocessing, presentations, spreadsheet, etc). Yes, yes, I know about StarOffice and Open Office and Abiword and Gnumeric... these are all decent packages, and I have real hope for OpenOffice. But the problem is that right now this is what is keeping many people from adopting Linux on the desktop.
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Good name (Score:3)
wishus
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I don't know about you... (Score:3)
Ironic choice of names... (Score:5)
.NET cloned or not, Microsoft wins (Score:4)
If nobody creates an open-source .NET, Microsoft will be its only vendor and, because of their strong monopoly, .NET will be accepted reluctantly by everybody.
If someone creates an open-source implementation of .NET that's compatible with Microsoft's, it will help make the .NET standard accepted, so Microsoft will sell more of it and .NET equivalents (free or not) will die disappear even faster
If someone creates a broken implementation of .NET (or Microsoft breaks the standard afterward), people will fall back reluctantly on Microsoft's version (the original) and the open-source community's ability to create good software will be questioned by Microsoft and the Microsofties.
So, whatever the community decides to do with .NET, Microsoft wins. That's why Microsoft has "no objections" (sic) to third-party open-source .NET implementations, and that's why most open-source public figures look like they're sitting on hot coal when the issue pops up.
All in all, .NET is pure genius from Microsoft, a very subtle game of chicken with the community where they have no chance to lose because of they monopolistic stronghold. Pity for us ...
Why let MS write the rules here? (Score:5)
I think it behooves the Linux community as a whole to stop longing for compatibility with Microsoft (they obviously dont want it anyway) and build products that outclass theirs instead. Do you honestly think a non-bloated word processor couldnt be made that would beat out Word? Stop trying to support word's format and build your own wp app. (or maybe a better one already exists, I don't use wp apps, hooray for vi)
Exchange seems like another product that could be bested. Exchange is a total mess! Don't try to make your mail server work with Exchange, make your mail server work better than Exchange. Most Exchange features aren't used anyway, and just add to the bloat.
Why break your backs trying to play nice with .NET? I don't mean to invalidate compatibility for existing standards, but don't help usher in their new MS-centric efforts.
Would you rather support their way... or have your own way?
Re:I know what they should *really* call it... (Score:3)
There's still a problem (Score:3)
I know what they should *really* call it... (Score:5)
.ORG (Since .org is for non-profits).
Re:Java? (Score:3)
That's just wrong. Both C# and Java use an intermediate "virtual machine", which can get handled by an interpreter or a compiler. Sun's JDK mostly compiles, and its native code compiler is very good, better than Microsoft's C# native code compiler.
It would be interesting to see how GCC 3.0 compiled Java code would compare with C# code.
While quite usable, the GCC 3.0 Java compiler doesn't generate highly optimized code in my experience. Sun's JDK seems to beat it handily. The big advantage of GCC 3.0 for Java right now is that it generates more traditional executables that start up fast.
no, sorry, that's not quite true (Score:3)
Both "C# delegates" and nested classes were considered for Java by the designers, and they decided to go with nested classes. Nested classes are more powerful and also give you independence from method names. (As an aside, "delegates" is a misnomer for what C# provides.)
Java's op codes prevent languages like C and C++ to target their VM, whereas .NET allows C and C++ programs to target their VM as well as efficiently as any other language.
Microsoft's runtime does not run C or C++, it runs "managed C++", which is a subset of C++; you could do the same on the JVM. They also integrated their C++ compiler with the Java runtime so that C++ code compiled to native code can interoperate with the Java runtime, kind of like what gcc and some commercial Java compilers offer for Java, but that has all the usual disadvantages of native code.
C#, CLR submitted as standard to EMCA. Java is proprietary. Sun may charge a fee for the use of their JVMs, libraries in the future.
That's a red herring. There is no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to comply with their ECMA submission; they may well add extensions. In fact, since their ECMA submission lacks most libraries real programs rely on, they already have. And unlike C#/.NET, there are already dozens of third party Java implementations, several of them open source. So, it doesn't matter what Sun does or doesn't do. Sun controls the "Java" trademark and their implementation, nothing more (and it is those that Microsoft ran afoul of).
Templates to be built into .NET virtual machine for greater efficiency and code sharing unlike GJ's template afterthought mechanism.
Right now, they are absent. It's also unclear whether there is any significant advantage to having them built in. Any implementation that wants to share a lot of code would essentially end up with an implementation similar to Java anyway.
Re:Interesting .NET technologies (Score:4)
That idea predates both Java and C# by decades. The Java designers surely considered it.
Is it a good design decision to automate this? That is an open question. If you automate boxing/unboxing, most programmers won't know it's happening, and they will wonder while their code runs so slowly. It also leads to unobvious behavior when people try to use inheritance with number classes.
A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI).
Specific compilers do that for Java as well. GNU GCJ treats C++ and Java classes interchangeably, and some commercial compilers do (or have in the past) as well. The disadvantage is, of course, that if you rely on this, your code is now machine dependent and unsafe.
completely agree: Gnome should go with Java (Score:5)
Also, while I think it would make sense for the Gnome project to use Java bindings to Gnome, I think Swing itself is getting a bad wrap. It's a well-designed toolkit that runs fine on reasonably fast machines. It's completely written in, and completely extensible in, Java. In a year or two, nobody will think twice about its speed. Most of the performance complaints about Swing are actually just the cost of the initial class loading and JIT compilation. Well-written Java programs structure that load process so that it doesn't bother users, but Sun is addressing these issues with each release.
There are no significant technical differences between Java and C# as languages. C# is neither harder nor easier to compile than Java. C# is not more expressive and it isn't less expressive. As languages, they are interchangeable. The question is: given these other considerations, which is the right choice? To me, the answer is pretty clearly Java, not C#.
So...er... (Score:4)
Or did Ximian decide for them?