I’m somehow familiar with the ASP.NET MVC and the .NET framework in general (I use it at work).
I’ve been thinking about starting a personal project (a website). I, however, don’t want to be tied to a specific platform (it bothers me A LOT).
This led me to looking into Mono. For what I’ve seen, though, Mono trails behind Microsoft’s .NET in some aspects that are crucial to me (or that I would really like to have available). Some of these are:
- LINQ to SQL. The Mono team just now (Mono 2.6) released support for LINQ with help from the DBLinq project. The problems are that DBLinq’s main test platform are MS SQL SERVER and SQLite. It seems to me that PostgreSQL and MySQL are a bit abandoned. Also, LINQ to SQL has just been implemented and thus it makes me think when it will become mature.
- Hosting of Mono on Linux. Very few of these are available.
Also, I want to be prepared to handle heavy-duty processing on the server (this is a main issue), and Twitter’s experience makes me drift away from Ruby on Rails, but if you can prove RoR scales weel (please, show benchmarks/facts and not opinions) I’d be willing to try it.
- Should I take my time learning a different web framework, or should I rely on Mono’s advances and hosting options for the near future (1~2 years) on platforms other than Windows/SQL Server.
- In terms of scalability, I tend to think that C# has an inherent aspect of scalability (strongly typed and ByteCode instead of parsed/interpreted). Am I wrong to think like that?
- Are there ways to work with other frameworks in ways that the code won’t be hosted on the server (I accept python/ruby/anything VMs and others)
This is an old question so I may be answering more for others than for the original poster:
Hosting
If you write in Mono, you can host on Windows, Mac, or Linux (or Solaris, FreeBSD, and others less dependably). If you are going to host on Windows though, why not just run your Mono app on the real .NET?
Why do you care if it is hosted on Mono if you are not hosting it yourself? You can certainly write an application on Mono using Windows, Linux, or Mac and then host it on a Windows/.NET host if those are the cheapest and easiest to find. Just think of .NET as the MS implementation of Mono.
I had the opposite problem originally. I wanted to host on Linux even though my employer provided a Windows dev environment. I developed in .NET and hosted on Mono/Linux. Mono worked excellently for me in this way.
My current employer is Mac crazy. I just deployed an ASP.NET MVC2 app to our Mac server yesterday. I wrote the whole thing on my MacBook Pro without touching Windows once.
My favourite host for running .NET/Mono on Linux is Linode. The cheapest plan is $20/month but I can host as many apps on the same server as I want. The performance is excellent so anything that is going to run well on a $5/month host is going to run just fine as one of four apps on a Linode instance that is for sure.
Compatibility with .NET
I find it is best to think of Mono as a platform itself rather than as a compatibility solution for your Microsoft apps. Mono supports almost the entire .NET framework. I love this because it is a great framework but I do not really care that it is MS compatible most days.
No offence, but I do not understand at all your implication of “Mono does not support LINQ-to-SQL to my satisfaction so I am considering Ruby-On-Rails”. Mono supports LINQ-to-SQL a lot better than Ruby does I will tell you that. You could say that you are sticking with Windows only because you really need LINQ-to-SQL though I suppose. What is more important to you, “cross platform” or “LINQ-to-SQL”?
Mono gives you many choices for data access. If you want an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) like Rails offers then you could go for something like NHibernate, Subsonic, or Castle ActiveRecord for example. With Mono 2.10 you can even use WebMatrix Data. Of course, you could also use good ‘ole ADO.NET which is what all this stuff is built on top of anyway.
Oh, and let’s not lose site of the fact that Mono does support LINQ-to-SQL. I have only ever used it with SQLite where it worked fine. I agree that it has lagged .NET though. You are probably worried about Entity Framework support now. See my comments above.
To my mind, the question is how does Mono data access compare to Rails data access. My answer: Rails is a bit better integrated (simpler) and Mono is much more powerful and flexible.
Heavy-duty processing
This is where .NET and Mono are really going to shine.
You are correct to think that compiled bytecode is going to be much faster than interpreted code and that static languages like C# will be faster than dynamic languages like Ruby. Of course, everything is implementation dependent in the end.
I also agree that a static language like C# aids scalability in other ways. This is really a matter of personal opinion though. There are certainly people that think that authoring and maintaining a massive solution in a dynamic language is feasible. I do not see many people doing that of course. There is a reason that .NET and Java are the enterprise standards.
Bottom line
Should you learn another web framework? Well, I think you should. It is good for the mind.
Is that other web framework a superior choice to Mono or .NET? Well, it depends on the need of course. I think that Rails folks probably pump out the sites a little faster than the .NET crowd in general. The gap has really closed with ASP.NET MVC2+ though and I would much, much rather maintain and scale a .NET solution than a Rails one. Also, I like C# just fine so I do not find Ruby itself so intrinsically satisfying that I just have to use it. That is just me of course.
Also, just me, but I find Mono to be an excellent cross platform web development framework. I choose it everyday over other solutions. I also find that Mono fits into the majority of the .NET ecosystem (especially the Open Source universe) just fine. Again though, if what you really want is to use the very latest and greatest MS stuff and are hoping that Mono will allow you to run that on Linux or Mac sometimes then you may be disappointed.
If Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Entity Framework, or to a lesser extent LINQ-to-SQL are the most important part of your application strategy then Mono is not for you.
If you want a platform that gives you all the great advantages of .NET and runs pretty much everywhere you need it to then Mono is pretty damn hard to beat.