Mono Success Story

by Miguel de Icaza

I mentioned a few days ago Joshua's GovtTrack.us web site. This web site is data intensive and was ported from Perl to Mono, according to Joshua the porting experience was a joy.

Joshua is one of the XSLT magicians in the Mono project, the man who turned 3,000 lines of C# code for pretty-printing our documentation into 300 lines of XSLT macros.

But Joshua did not use ASP.NET to write the new site, Joshua rolled out his own processing model using Mono and the low-level hooks of System.Web, he discusses the porting process on a recent article:

Websites have some of the same design issues as programs. One common issue is how to avoid duplication, but while software developers have solved this issue with functions, website developers are still struggling for a solution. GovTrack.us, my new website, solves this problem using XSL transformations and the Mono framework.

The article is interesting for anyone interested in extending and hooking up to the HTTP processing pipeline in Mono and also discusses how to extend Mono's XSLT with C#-coded functions.

Joshua has a blog.

Linex (Debian) packages for Mono

Users of Linex can download packages for Mono from here. The rumor on the street is that Alo himself packaged Mono. Maybe he has finally reached enlightenment.

Posted on 04 Oct 2004