Developers using Microsoft's popular
Visual Studio
.Net software engineering suite were today offered a plug-in that allows
them to code web applications for Linux.
Referred to as Grasshopper, the freely available
Visual
MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition is designed to link Visual Studio
development to Linux and J2EE server deployments.
Grasshopper was designed by
Mainsoft and is
claimed to be the first Visual Studio-based IDE for Linux.
It enables developers to develop, debug and deploy web applications and web
services for Windows, Linux and any Java-enabled platform using Visual Studio
software, C# and Visual Basic .Net. The offering is aimed at individual
developers and small user group deployments.
Access to enterprise features such as multi-CPU capabilities and
fully-featured J2EE servers, including WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic, are
available in Mainsoft's
Visual
MainWin for J2EE Enterprise Edition.
Grasshopper is the result of Mainsoft's two-year collaboration with
Mono, an
open source development community working on an open source version of the
Microsoft .Net development
platform.
With Grasshopper, Visual Studio .Net developers can contribute enhancements,
class libraries and fixes to Grasshopper's and Mono's shared open source
runtime.
According to a recent study by
Evans Data
Corporation, more than a quarter of European developers using Visual Studio
.Net as their primary development environment have written an application for
Linux, and more than a third are likely to write a Linux application next year.
The study also indicated that two thirds of the Visual Studio .Net developers
surveyed have used open source components in their application development.
"Many ISVs use the high productivity of Visual Studio to quickly bring
commercial applications to market, and then pay a steadily increasing price
because they offer Windows-only deployments," said Yaacov Cohen, president and
chief executive at Mainsoft.
"We are seeing market leaders turn to Mainsoft to deliver the best of both
worlds: the high productivity of Visual Studio and multiple deployments on J2EE
application servers, as well as Windows and Linux deployments."
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