[Mono-list] Would mono support this kind of application?

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello Stefan,

    To familiarize myself with C#, I'm thinking about creating a wiki/blogger
> application using C#.  While I'm working on XP, our servers here run Linux
> and I want to keep it that way.  So, using C# for this application does only
> make sense to me if I can use mono to eventually host the applicaion on a
> Linux box.

Heh, funny you would say that.  The reason I have refused to update my
web page content is because I want to make sure that the next version of
my web page is "powered" by Mono (blog included ;-).

Good choice.  The next step is to replace a few of those XP machines
with a Linux desktop ;-)

> On .NET I'm probably suppost to use ASP to create web applications.
> Unfortunately I don't know anything about that (JSP and PHP are the only *P
> technologies I know) and I don't know whether ASP.NET is supported by mono
> yet (would it use Apache as Webserver, similar to Tomcat?).

The good news is that we are working on ASP.NET support;  The bad news
is that you can not expect this to exist for at least another six
months. 

> and parsing a query string isn't that difficult.  FileUpload would be,
> however.  So is there any class from System.Web, I could use?  HttpRequest
> and friends all look like there're just for ASP usage.

I have the impression that FileUpload is just an http post, which should
not be complicated at all.  I am sure you can use some of the class
libraries without ASP.NET

> probably very similar, but I know Servlet programming very well and a
> compatible API would be a big plus.

We do not have anything like that.  Something that many of us want to
see happening is to have a JVM-Bytecode to IL bytecode conversion
program (Gaurav has looked into this in the past), and then run existing
Java software on top of Mono.

> I think, I'd keep pages as XML files, removing the need for a database.
> FileIO and XML processing is part of mono already, isn't it?  Instead of
> using XSLT to translate XML data into HTML applications, I think about using
> a template macro system similar to jakarta Velocity.  This is probably
> something I have to create myself.

Some pieces of XML are ready, some are not.  It would be great if you
start work on your wiki/blog tool, and as you move along, contribute to
the project in the areas that its missing functionality (btw, Alan Cox,
one of the main Linux developers started work on Linux because he needed
a system to run a Mud server.  He ended up developing and maintaining
the TCP/IP stack for the kernel ;-)

> A very common feature for wiki servers is that the user need not use HTML.
> So I have transform the wiki syntax into HTML. I'd like to make heavy use of
> regular expressions here.

We have a *marvelous* implementation of the regular expressions package,
implemented by Dan Lewis.

Miguel.