Mainsoft's Grasshopper Gives Visual Studio Developers a jump on writing Linux Apps

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1819419,00.asp

Mainsoft Corp. Tuesday announced a program and a new tool for Visual Studio .Net developers to use their familiar tool set to write applications for Linux.

The San Jose, Calif., company announced its Visual Studio .Net for Linux Developer Program as well as its new Visual MainWin for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) Developer Edition tool, code-named Grasshopper.

From the article, It looks like there will be two versions.  The free version works with Apache/Tomcat.  The for-pay version works with several J2EE platforms.

Wally

4 Comments

  • Seems like a weird concept.



    Instead of running .NET applications directly on the Mono framework, they're converting Mono to Java and running the .NET apps as Java apps on Linux: "We use the Grasshopper binary compiler to compile the C# Mono sources to Java™ bytecode, and we provide the .NET Framework class library on top of the J2EE™ infrastructure."



    Why not just run the .NET apps directly on Mono as designed (other than the fact that Mainsoft sells a product that converts .NET to Java)?

  • >>Why not just run the .NET apps directly on Mono as designed (other than the fact that Mainsoft sells a product that converts .NET to Java)? <<



    Lots of reasons.



    1. Run-time characteristics of J2EE?

    2. Leverage of investment in J2EE app servers?

    3. Corporate Policies around using Mono and/or open source code?

    4. Integration with systems management tools that are designed for J2EE app servers?



    ...and many more! :)



  • In this way you can utilize all of java/j2ee services (libraries, application server infrastructures etc..). You can't overlook the advantages in using j2ee.




  • 2 additional reasons:



    1. JVM - you still cannot compare the performance, scalability and reliability of

    Java Virtual Machines from different vendors

    to the VM provided by Mono. The Mono VM has

    a long way to go till it will be comparable

    with leading JVM(s)



    2. Real multi-platform solution. Mono can run

    on several platforms in addition to Linux, however - there are still platforms which unsupported by Mono, and the quality of supported

    platform still not ready for "real-world-production-environment", IMHO.

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