February 04, 2004

OmniaMea platform

What is the platform OmniaMea will run on? Will it run on Linux and Mac OS X as well?

OmniaMea is a .NET application, and currently it runs only under Windows. We will support Windows 2000/XP/2003; support for Windows 98/Me is still under discussion.

We are interested in supporting MacOS X and Linux through Mono. However, by the time we plan to release OmniaMea version 1.0, we don't expect that Mono will be mature enough to do a port of a complex WinForms application with little effort, and we don't have the development resources to do a second version of the UI (in GTK or a different toolkit). So, most likely, support for other platforms will have to wait until after 1.0 is released.

Posted by Dmitry Jemerov at February 4, 2004 04:08 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I am curious why you guys decided to write this app in C# instead of Java (essentially leaving us linux and mac users w/o an option since it will be a while until Mono supports WinForms). Is it for the ease of integration with Outlook?

Posted by: jknowles at February 5, 2004 02:11 AM

Yes, this is one of the reasons. The integration with Outlook requires a lot of complicated COM interop code, and it would be much harder (if at all possible) to write it in Java.

Posted by: Dmitry Jemerov at February 5, 2004 09:19 AM

With regards to Gtk and GtkSharp ( which I've used in the past, and am also looking at using in a current small project ). GtkSharp works fine on Windows ( although the current install process is a little disjointed ). But a localized install for a single app shouldn't be hard to work out.

That would give one development platform with a standard GUI engine as well.

I believe Gtk/GtkSharp work on Mac as well.

Posted by: Mark Derricutt at February 17, 2004 12:37 PM

Why don't you guys check out our JuggerNET product? I pointed it out to Eugene last year, but I guess it was more in the "leverage IDEA for C#" context and you guys decided to go native. JuggerNET generates C# proxy types for Java classes and it also generates the necessary attributes for COM interoperability. Several of our customers use their Java clases from VB6 via COM/.NET interop and it works very well.

Posted by: Alex Krapf at March 13, 2004 12:15 AM

Alex: Thanks for the pointer to JuggerNET. However, I don't think we could find any use for it in the OmniaMea project. We didn't have any existing code (in Java or otherwise) we could use. We needed to write COM client, not server code, and writing this code in Java would be harder than in C#, in any case. And starting development in two languages in parallel would just make our job harder.

Now if you tell me that JuggerNET allows me to use Swing components on my Windows Forms smoothly and without the need to run two virtual machines, that would be interesting. But I doubt it would be possible...

Posted by: Dmitry Jemerov at March 13, 2004 10:57 AM

Is there anything that can convert a program written in VB6 so it can run on a MAC? I heard of a program called REALbasic, are there other methods?

Posted by: Laura at May 26, 2005 05:39 AM
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