Hey team, Long-time listener, first-time caller. I wanted to get your advice on something...I'm helping a high-energy team of Linux ninjas who are interested in creating an OSS app that makes it easier to sell stuff on eBay. (Giving developers this kind of help is actually part of my job at eBay.) These guys just got into the planning stages of their project and are trying to settle on a choice of language/framework/etc. They want to use a client/server architecture which actually makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with caching and handling eBay data from eBay's API in an intelligent way.
It's my intuitive sense that C#/Mono may be a good choice for this kind of project. Maintainability and developer productivity is a big deal with custom eBay clients that use the API because eBay changes so frequently, and I've had to agonize with developers that have made sub-optimal language and architecture choices in the past and paid for it dearly as their applications implode repeatedly. However, they're gravitating to C++, at least for their server piece, which may be a good choice for the lead developer(s) who I think already knows C++, but may be a sub-optimal choice for the project in general. I fear that they may be in "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" mode. One tactical thing they seem to be getting hung up on is the fact that you need to run Mono apps with a command line (and, secondarily, an executable that ends in *.exe reeks of evil Windows; I explained to them that this is what chmod +x is for, but anyway). My questions are: - Do you have good evangelism tactics for Linux developers who evaluate Mono and find it somehow "un-Unix-like"? - Is there a technical answer to the "mono my.exe" command-line objection? - Is there an elegant solution for distributing the Mono framework onto client machines today? - Are there examples of functioning high-performance client/server apps running on Mono today? I suspect that this kind of discussion will be useful in a general-purpose sense as you take the message of Mono out to the rest of the universe, but feel free to respond to me privately if you like. If you're interested, the original discussion is over on the Gentoo forums here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=123105 Thanks, Jeffrey _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list