It seems to me that with the release of MonoTouch and Mono for Android Mono has gotten a lot more attention and the quality of the Mono runtime has increased significantly through these products offered by Xamarin.
But as it looks Xamarin is only focused on "mobile development" and not on classic Linux development or embedded Linux development. Are there any other companies which offer (commercial) support in this area?
I am a little bit worried because we are planing to develop a large product based on embedded Linux and Mono. Where can I find support if there are any problems?
You should speak to Xamarin. They do offer commercial support for Mono, as per the Mono website:
Commercial Support
Additionally, you could try talking with Lanedo
Miguel de Icaza has stated recently in various interviews and e-mails in mailing list that Xamarin are not offering consulting services outside the Mobile space.
However, Mono is open source, and as such, doesn't have any vendor lock-in. Virtually any opensource-based consulting firm could offer support contracts.
But I guess you want to know people who already have experience in supporting this software stack. Then, you have some particular alternatives:
Sinenomine. This company has been mentioned several times by Miguel de Icaza.
Lanedo. As mentioned by #TheNextMan, this company has done some consulting work for Xamarin too.
Any freelance individual. From time to time, companies requiring consulting just post to the mono mailing list, and they get contacted by potential mono contributors to do work on a contractual basis (an example: me).
Related
We currently need a portal solution. One of our service providers has already suggested that we develop the portal in Apache OFBiz.
Now I would like to know if Apache OFBiz is still state of the art or if it is already on the way down.
Or is there another technology we should consider.
Best Regards,
Foerstar
Apache OFBiz is a solid Open Source framework that is actively maintained and updated by its community that is part of the Apache Software Foundation.
While the OFBiz architecture has been outlined years ago, it is still a modern framework that incorporates several pragmatic patterns and is designed to be flexible and extendable. Moreover various components and technologies have been kept up to date or replaced with newer ones over the years.
It is impossible to tell you if OFBiz is a good fit for your portal solution because I don't know your specific needs but my recommendation is to at least consider it especially if in your portal you will publish content related to products or other business entities: if this is the case then the OFBiz universal data model will be a valuable resource that will help you to achieve your goals efficiently and with high quality.
All,
I'm attempting to estimate the effort to port an app developed on Windows (.NET) to Linux (Mono). I came across the MoMA tool, which attempts to look through my .exe and find potential areas of incompatibility. Most of my issues appear to be centered around get/set of network settings, getting network info, etc. (Object ManagementBaseObject.get_Item and set_Item. etc).
In almost all of the cases, the Mono functionality is listed as "ToDo". For estimation purposes, is it safe to assume most/all of these have some kind of workaround? I would imagine this type of basic networking support must be included in the latest version of Mono. Or should I assume none of this is currently available and I would be stuck waiting for it to be implemented (or be forced to implement it myself)?
Thanks,
Dan
First,see Mono Compatible Networking/Socket Library. Also,take a look on Cross-Platform Network Applications with Mono. You can start with C# Network Library.
I wanted to start with the smartcard programming soon. Please help me the things required for starting the learning using javacard. Which IDE (If any IDE Supports), Software and Hardware related? Like Mobile phone simulator is there any smartcard simulator or else if I have to buy a smartcard specify those cards where and how I can get?
A general answer regarding smartcard programming is that you should be ready to navigate a confusing list of tools and technologies. Typically smartcard developers begin with a specific hardware platform in mind: more specific than simply javacard.
Since you've specifically mentioned javacard, we can focus on a few starting points.
Javacard SDK
You might begin with the javacard dev kit. I haven't used the most recent - I'm still using 2.0.2. This dev kit is very command-line oriented, so expect to be doing most of your work outside an IDE. However, the documentation is pretty helpful and should get you up to speed pretty quickly. At any rate, it's a good place to start, since it's official.
EclipseJCDE also looks interesting, but I haven't used it. I seem to recall another project aiming to build javacard Eclipse tools, but I may just be thinking of EclipseJCDE.
IBM Tools
At one time IBM published and maintained a set of JCOP tools that integrated with the Eclipse IDE. The great thing about this is that they would send you a package containing some dev tools and a couple of JCOP cards. The annoying thing is that an activation code was required. Have a look here. The download link is still good, good luck with the email address listed there. Also note that these tools require an older build of Eclipse. The build/debug support is very good, including a built-in javacard simulator.
Global Platform
If you plan on doing javacard programming, you should also get to know Global Platform. It's a smartcard standard, and in the context of javacard, you'll need to know about the GP spec when you need to load and manage javacard applets. This is required for working with JCOP cards. For the latest GP spec search for GlobalPlatform Card Specifications. You'll need to be very familiar with basic smartcard concepts, e.g. APDUs.
Hardware
Hardware choices are too varied for me to make useful recommendations, beyond the JCOP stuff above. As I mentioned, if you can use the IBM kit then you'll get a good JCOP/javacard simulator with the Eclipse tools. I'm sure there are other card simulators available.
etc.
Beyond that there is a long list of other technical specifications employed by smartcard programmers, and unfortunately many of them aren't freely available (ISO docs). If you'll be doing GSM programming, I think you can get to all of the GSM specs, search for ETSI GSM specifications. GSM 11.11 is particularly useful for learning more about APDU command/response, without access to ISO specs, e.g. ISO 7816-4.
Share two new Free tools that I am using to learn javacard here.Hope to help others get started with javacard easily.
JCIDE: It is an Integrated Development Environment designed specifically for the Java Card programming language.
PyAPDUTool: It is a handy tool which can communicate with the card via the reader connected to PC. It is a PC/SC compliant application.
we are starting a new desktop project and we are evaluating adobe air as our development platform. this is because most our team are flex developers and we want to take advantage of that. but we have several question in order to decide whether or not to use air as a development platform.
How recomended is to use a bridge to
communicate with peripherals through
serial and paralell ports.How can i
communicate air application with my
system database.
There is a well known framework for
object persistence, like hibernate
??. if not, what is the best approach.?
Which are the best approach for our
applications distribution, how can we
deal with product key, product
licenses, etc. What advantage do we
have using AIR MarketPlace ?
Any help you can provide me, to point me in right direction, i will appreciates
Cheers,
system communication via NativeProcesses (since Air 2.0)
Air supports SQLite; from Air you can communicate via RPC or socktes with (for example) a JavaServer with Hibernate
Air App Licensing with Sharify
Damian
I seem to end up evaluating a lot of software. This requires me to constantly install all kinds of things on my system. It creates a huge clutter and I spend a lot of time during the install process, and if I don't like it, then removing everything I've done. Much of my evaluation tends away from the features of the software being evaluated and toward how difficult it is to install. I'm sure I miss good software which may have actually been a better choice, because of this startup cost.
With the advent of VM software like VMWare Player and VirtualBox, it would be much easier to sell someone like me your software, if you just provided an image that I could load into the VM and run. I'd be looking at the features almost immediately rather than fighting with which revision of whatever. The VM would take care of all of this for me.
Am I missing something, or should vendors and OSS start distributing VMs for their wares?
Most of my evaluations are for server side software installed on Linux, so OS licensing is not the issue.
VMs require that the operating system have a valid license key. For free operating systems this wouldn't be an issue, but if you're developing for something like Windows machines, each time they send out a demo version of their software, they're sending out a license key that they would have to pay for.
This would be incredibly expensive for most companies.
The only downside I would say IMHO is the size of the images, if say you have a 20 MB application, do you really want to download/transfer an entire OS just for that application.
I would say a better approach would be to have a ready to go VM and then you simply take a snapshot (on Virtual Box, I assume similar feature exist in other players)
Then simply install the applciation inside your sandbox environment, and then just Zap it when done (i.e. return to your Snapshot)
Darknight
This can be done for softwre that runs on open source platforms, and VMware have a library of images which do just this (though the images that are used for evaluating commercial software is generally for infrastructure-type things that have very, very complex installation requirements):
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
However, if the software is for the Windows platform, you don't really have the opportunity to do this, as Microsoft's Windows licensing would prevent it. Unless, you're Microsoft, of course, in which case you can in fact do this - and MS has done this to permit easier evaluation of such software as Visual Studio, SQL, and many others:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx?ppud=4
Novell has an appliance builder called Suse Studio that lets you pick the software you want, it builds out a VM with the software (and dependencies, etc) for you. You can then try out the VM, download it, etc.
Whether the software you're looking for is available or not is a different matter.
Disclaimer: I work for Novell (though not with the Suse team)
But yes, if you can deal with the OS licensing issues, or possibly host trial environments yourself, this is a very effective way for a vendor to demo their app. The problem is that all vendors don't always have the infrastructure (or lack the awareness) to do so.
Microsoft provides fully-provisioned VM's for time-limited trials of their software. So if you want to trial select Microsoft products in that manner, you can do that today.
There is no sign, though, that Microsoft will make this available to third party Windows software vendors.
In the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) world, you can get fully-provisioned virtual servers that include Windows and your software of interest on a pay-as-you-go basis, based on both Linux and Windows. For example, see Amazon Web Services
For windows, you may be better off developing a portable application that runs from a usb key. That is how Embarcadero distribute All Access. I received a 4 gb usb key that contained multiple applications. Most could be run straight from the key without installation. I believe Embarcadero will be licensing the technology at some stage.
If you are using a programming language such as Delphi or C++ with little in the way of external dependencies, a portable application is straight forward to develop. For .net, it is much harder, but can be done with Mono, or something like Virtual Application Studio.