Subject: [extropy-chat] Race to Linux

From: Emlyn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:21:22 +0930

A link to this turned up in my email today, and may interest some people here:

http://www.codeproject.com/racetolinux/

"Join the Race to Linux for a chance to win an XBox 360"

The Race to Linux challenges Visual Studio developers to port existing
ASP.NET applications to Linux using their cross-platform tool of
choice (e.g. Grasshopper, Mono, PHP, Macromedia, etc.). The
applications to be ported to run on Linux will be announced at the
start of each race. The hardware used for judging will be IBM xSeries.

The winners of each of the three races will win an Xbox 360. In
addition, contestants using Grasshopper will also qualify to win an
Xbox 360 game of their choice. Limit one Xbox 360 and one game per
participant.

(etc)

---
I've been checking this stuff out recently, so I have a bit of an idea
about these technologies.

Grasshopper is a free Visual Studio plugin (For the uninitiated,
Visual Studio is Microsoft's development environment for Windows). It
compiles .Net IL code (native output of Visual Studio) to Java
bytecode, so that you can apparently run .Net applications as Java
apps. IIRC, they also (necessarily) provide an implementation of the
.Net framework for Java - on looking it up, I see that they use
grasshopper to recompile Mono as java bytecode.

Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net framework, which
works on Linux. Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Windows, so a much greater
reach than Microsoft's own .Net framework. I'm currently rebuilding my
website as an ASP.Net application, developing using Visual Studio 2003
on Windows 2003 server using IIS, but deploying to some Linux based
webspace using Mono and Apache. I'm using MySQL for the database. It's
early days, but this cockamamie approach actually seems to be working
:-)

So from the site above, it seems that the race is about porting a C#
.net application to Linux, any way that you deem fit; you can rewrite
it entirely in PHP if you want to, but it is a race! Using Grasshopper
to make it a Java application is different to using Mono to run your
IL code as-is on Linux, but both approaches are likely to be the most
promising.

Will I enter the competition? Not sure... I might give it a try...

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *
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