ok, gotta get a couple things off my chest. at work, i developed an ASP.NET application. it was developed in Windows, and was supposed to be ported over to Linux (Mono Project) for the client. the transition was fairly simple, most of the problems came from not getting the classpath correct. Mono worked as it was designed to, and we had no problems with both WebForms and using Windows compiled DLLs directly.

that being said, this system was developed on a Windows server running IIS. the clients’ webserver: apache. i can imagine the pure frustration you can forsee with configuring apache. apache’s config files are the worst in the OSS community. they could almost be considered a language and enviornment in their own right! needless to say, i spent countless hours attempting to get Apache to handle ASP requests. wanna know the secret:

1) set up config files (specifically, use ‘-D MONO’, set MonoUnixSocket to /tmp/mod_mono_server)

2) exec: % /usr/bin/mod-mono-server.exe –nonstop&

3) exec: % chmod 777 /tmp/mod-mono-server

4) start apache2

the important idea is that mod-mono-server.exe handles requests that are passed over the socket /tmp/mod-mono-server. you then need to have apache hand the request over to that socket. if you want, you can also have it bind to a port and have apache send the request there as well.

secondly, we’ve started porting an important website that was previously written in ASP.Net to JSP and Servlets. its an interesting conversion because it doesnt exactly do callbacks and doPostBack like ASP does, but i need to look into Struts more to see if that can bridge the gap. i started porting the connection broker library to Java and this could prove to be a valuable business asset. i am currently using NetBeans to do all my development, and i must add that i LOVE it way more than Visual Studio. its way more developer friendly. built in CVS support, built in javadoc automatic creation tool, and built in intellisense/javadoc browser. i hope we can do more work in the JSP enviornment, because i much prefer Java over C#.

gotta go, time to go home and eat dinner.