Asset management application design
 

Hi,

I'm planning on developing an asset management system for artists, much like CVS and Alienbrain, and I'm trying to decide what routes to take.

My feature list is finalized, and the main features I'm implementing are based on:

• Databases
• File systems
• Networking - a large portion of the system is network based
• Security
• Concurrency

At a later stage I will be implementing features that use:

• Multithreading and distributed computing

This system has to be cross platform, being cross-platform is a absolute requirement (between Windows and UNIX systems - no port for Mac is neccessary). It also has to be fast and easy to extend...

I have though about developing it with Java, but I'm not quite sure if this is the route I should take since I know for certain that there will be feature changes/additions in the future, that could be very far off from the initial design, i.e. a previz renderer.

For me, I really like the idea of using C# because the language is very powerful, even now, but the only problem is the cross-platform issue, I have never used MONO, and am not confident in MONO to provide the port.

So as far as I can conclude, C++ is the way to go, but I'd like some opinions on this. One thing I'm concerned about is distributed computing, which is a feature that is really important in this application design. As far as I know, there are no libraries for distributed computing on Windows systems, like there are for UNIX based... Distrubuted computing support with Java and especially C# are available.

I'm very keen to use a managed language (perferably C#), but without experience in MONO, I'm unsure.

On the other hand, I could use a variety of different languages to develop this system, but I've never had experience in this. I would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Hope you can help.

Thanks.

Re: Asset management application design
 

Why not code it and test it using the Mono compiler/runtime, even on Windows? It has the same featureset across all systems, so if it works, it'll work cross-platform.

Re: Asset management application design
 

Hey Ooble...

That's actually not a bad idea... Guess I should start looking at MONO...

Thanks!

Re: Asset management application design
 

One of the big "negatives" for Mono when I first looked into it for cross-platform GUI based programs in C#.... was that it did not support "Windows Forms". However, from a past project I worked on... I wrote the code in Windows using C# and ran the exe on Linux, complete with windows forms components, without the first problem. C# and Mono would be the way to go in my opinion.

Re: Asset management application design
 

Thats great. I'm definately gonna be testing MONO when I get a chance... Thanks for the helpful suggestions!

Re: Asset management application design
 

Mono currently supports WinForms from .NET 1.1, if I recall correctly. They're working on .NET 2.0 support. If you do need features not available in their implementation of WinForms, perhaps using Gtk# or Qt# might be a better option?

Re: Asset management application design
 

That's one of the reason's i'm quite hesitant to use MONO, the development seems to be very slow... While .NET is at version 3.5 now, MONO is only just going into .NET 2.0 support...

I did look at Qt, i really like the look of the API. I have also looked at certain other widget libraries, such as wxWidgets, and they seem reasonable.

For me, .NET is definately the best way to go, the language is really on the way up... I'm gonna start testing MONO right now...

Thanks for the pointers guys.

Re: Asset management application design
 

Hey guys,

Looking at the MONO documentation, it actually scares me a little, http://www.go-mono.com/docs/...

It looks like this project is really far behind... I don't see System.Net for example, or maybe I'm looking at really old docs?

Just checking?

Re: Asset management application design
 

It appears that they have C# compiler support for 3.0. And I found that System.Net does indeed exist (would be really stupid if it did not) - by reading the archive...

The documentation has probably not been updated for a very long time?

I'm feeling a bit better about using MONO... Have downloaded and will start working with it now...

The 1.2.6 archive.