The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. Its objective is to enable Unix developers to build and deploy cross-platform .NET Applications. The project will implement various technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to the ECMA for standardization.
The Mono project has also sparked a lot of interest in developing C#-based components, libraries and frameworks. Today Mono is not limited to implement the .NET Framework, but also contains other components. Some of the components of the Mono platform were developed by the Mono team, and some others we have incorporated from other open source efforts, the most important ones:
- Remoting.CORBA: A CORBA implementation for Mono.
- Ginzu: An implementation on top of Remoting for the ICE stack
- Gtk#: Bindings for the popular Gtk+ GUI toolkit for Unix and Windows systems. Other bindings are available: Diacanvas-Sharp and MrProject.
- #ZipLib: A library to manipulate various kinds of compressed files and archives (Zip and tar).
- GlGen (available from the Mono CVS): Bindings for OpenGL.
- Mono.LDAP: LDAP access for .NET apps.
- Mono.Data: We ship support for Postgress, MySql, Sybase, DB2, SqlLite, Tds (SQL server protocol) and Oracle databases.
- Mono.Cairo: Bindings for the Cairo rendering engine (Our System.Drawing is implemented on top of this).
- Mono.Posix: Bindings for building POSIX applications using C#.
- Mono.Http: Support for creating custom, embedded HTTP servers and common HTTP handlers for your applications.
