En el weblog de Miguel de Icaza hay un mensaje un poco viejo (septiembre pasado) donde habla referente a Mono, .NET y J2EE. Me pareció interesante sus observaciones y quise compartirlas.

Microsoft recently sponsored a research to compare the development costs of using .NET and J2EE to build enterprise applications. The story is here.

The results are not surprising to me. The study claims that .NET is on aveage 28% cheaper than developing with J2EE-based frameworks. Both J2EE and Swing have been over-engineered and over-designed. It is probably a very solid design, but has abused the model-view-controller architecture. If not kept under adult supervision architects designing MVC platforms make the development of average applications cumbersome.

The results are exactly along the lines of the input we received in March 2003 when we did the Second Mono Survey. Our Survey focused on ASP.NET as a technology for developing web-based applications, and the people we had a chance to interview gave us that same message: ASP.NET saves them on average 20% of their development time.

The research study we did shed some light into the debate. The application serving market can be divided in three groups:

Market	Development Price Range (dollars)	Technologies	State
Entry level	0-200,000	Php, Python, Zope, Perl, home-grown, cgi-bin, asp, aps.net, jsp, j2ee	Plenty of offerings, no dominant player.
Mid level	200,000 to 5,000,000	J2EE, ASP.NET	J2EE had an early start, but ASP.NET is taking over. These are multi-developer projects of six to twelve months. This market is very sensitive to development times, and a 20% to 28% increase in productivity makes ASP.NET solutions more competitive price-wise and more profitable. The Windows-only nature of ASP.NET its the only thing stopping its mass adoption.
High level	5,000,000+	J2EE and ASP.NET	J2EE is considered the standard to use. These projects require hardware mobility and are large organizational projects. The availability of many J2EE providers is considered a big plus. The lack of third-party providers for ASP.NET slows down its adoption in this market.

Mono is by no means ready to be an ASP.NET provider on the high-level application server market today, but the mid-market is the sweet spot for Mono and will help drive the adoption of ASP.NET. This is very compelling, because developers can use the state-of-the-art Visual Studio to create their applications (cutting costs there), and deploy on Linux (cutting costs on the server side).

Plugins in Mono

Nat asked me to write a small document for people who are interesting in creating applications with plugins. The following is the smallest setup I could think of (this is the same model I used on the Dashboard).

Gnome 2.4 is out

The anticipated release of Gnome 2.4 is out now. It includes a list of Why use Gnome?

Ars Technica has a pretty good review.

[Miguel de Icaza]