Review: Move .Net Apps To Linux

However, the developers recommend using XSP only for development and not production. The XSP server is useful when debugging code through the command line. With Apache, ASP.Net code does not need a lot of configuration. This is great news for Windows developers, since Apache requires adjusting many configurations.

Mono's mod_mono.so module for Apache is simple to use. The mod_mono server has a Web-based control panel and supports Unix TCP sockets, including multiple path configurations. In addition to Novell's SUSE, the mod_mono server can work with Ubuntu. Configuring mod_mono on Ubuntu's Apache takes a little manual work. The Mono project has made it possible for developers to create alternatives to the Microsoft toolset. For instance, developers can choose from a number of tools that either replace various capabilities of ASP.Net or work on top of ASP.Net.

The Castle project is one of the most exciting subprojects spun out of Mono. Castle was inspired by the Ruby on Rails framework, so it supports the MVC architecture.

Developers have ported Java frameworks and tools into the Mono runtime. For instance, developers can use the Spring.Net framework to build applications on the Spring Framework J2EE project. Developers can mix and match Mono-based ASP.Net and ADO.Net with Spring services and other application interfaces. Developers can even use front-end code using Ajax generators and runtimes to remove the ASP.Net HTML model.

Mono's ADO.Net supports many open-source and commercial databases. Here, too, developers ported some Java libraries and tools.

The NHibernate tool, for example, stems from the Java Hibernate project. NHibernate is a powerful extension of the SQL language that allows developers to build persistent classes that map to database objects. Developers also can choose from many open-source data providers and tools such as MonoQuery.

Through Novell's Developer Service, Mono users can purchase support for $2,500 for a year. Support can range from five incidents to having a dedicated engineer.

The future of the Mono project looks bright. While Mono developers are paving the way for Microsoft developers to port code to Linux, most Microsoft developers are still entrenched in the Microsoft sphere and for good reason: Mono is still slower, and many projects are incomplete.

Engineers hope to see projects like DotNetNuke and others on Sourceforge migrate to Mono in the near future so that Microsoft developers can take advantage of Linux.