Hi SO.
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)