iFolder and Mono
Just finished a session on the next version of iFolder and Mono. Novell announced yesterday that they are placing the iFolder project into the Open Source community and it's available for download on the
Novell Forge site. One of the presenters commented that they already have a bug report on the site and it was just released yesterday.
From a .NET perspective there was a good decision tree analysis of why they picked the CLR / Mono route for their project. It basically came down to a discussion of the GUI and Java just didn't give them what they wanted. The look and feel along with deployment and performance were the Cons of a JVM approach.
On the Mono/.NET slide they did mention that there is an internal project to port Mono to the NetWare platform. This will give them complete platform independence for all the code both client side and server side.
All the GUI work they're doing is based on GTK# - the widget toolkit underneath the GNOME project. There are libraries for the Windows family making it a true cross platform solution. While the IDE and associated tools aren't quite as nice as Visual Studio they are making lots of progress. Monodevelop is not quite ready for prime time and isn't available as a package yet but looks pretty good.
I have in interview w/
Miguel de Icaza later today so I'll try to add notes from that later.
End of Day 1
This has been an interesting day. Most of it was spent in meetings but one post meeting discussion was particularly cool. Eric Anderson is an engineering manager and a passionate proponent of eXtreme Programming. Novell is using XP extensively and Eric attributes some of their improved productivity and reduced release schedules to XP.
We also discussed the topic of Rapid Application Development and got into the Microsoft vs Open Source. He's used Visual Studio and Monodevelop and said that the gap is quickly closing. I've yet to try out the tools on a Linux box so I'll withhold judgement until I can play with it myself.
We also discussed Longhorn, WinFS, and Indigo vs their Open Source equivalents. I don't think I was aware of some of the things that have a direct equivalent. With Novell announcing today that their iFolder product is going Open Source they have basically contributed a contender for the WinFS piece to the Linux community. I need to study up on this more but the project is called Simias and will be available shortly from the Novell Forge site.
Tomorrow I get to go to sessions and have an appointment with the Mono team. Should be interesting!
Chris Stone is next up.
How does Open Source fit in w/ my existing Novell products?
Linux Desktop - combination of SUSE and Ximian
- all Novell employees on OpenOffice by mid-summer 04
- all Novell employees on Linux Desktop and OO by end of 04
Web services & identity management focus
- ZENworks 6.5 public beta in April
- Runtime version of e-Directory code named Kepler
Reliability, scalability, and performance
- 18 month cycle on SUSE Linux
Developer Focus
- Eclipse
- Mono
- New events w/ developer focus
Video - 'Lord of the Net'
NOSghoul Call Center
Linus Torvalds just walked on stage. Panel discussion w/ Q&A.
Sitting in the keynote using my iPaq to blog from.
Jack Messman is going first.
Lots of Linux stuff. All desktops at the conference are running SUSE Linux.
- Eclipse support
- Identity Management Modeler based on Eclipse
- iFolder going Open Source - 'follow me' filing.
- YAST - to GPL
- Ngage focused on Govt. and retail
Customer story from Manhattan Construction - moved to Linux.
- Big support cost savings
Lots of emphasis on Partners.
I'm at Brainshare 04 this week in Salt Lake City. The keynote starts in about 20 minutes so I'll do a summary when it's over.
I really like the way that Novell does things at Brainshare. You get free hard copies of session notes just by filling out a form and choosing the ones you want. They also give out really cool bags. This year's bag has wheels and a telescoping handle. Lots of room for the laptop and stuff. They also gave out a Bluetooth wireless mouse that I haven't been able to get working yet.
More later!
