Before pressing the Publish Now button on my the Manos de Mono Manifesto, I mentally prepared myself for a beat down. I figured the redditors would tear it apart for using Mono, the hackernews guys would tear it apart for not being rails and the .net people would be angry about some missing enterprise feature. Oh yeah, and then there are the free software people.

I think the redditors scared me the most. You know that scene in every zombie movie, where the annoying guy that you want to die is sneaking through a group of distracted zombies. Inevitably he drops something, it makes a loud noise, and dozens of zombies turn, stare for a second, moan and attack. Thats what having your article submitted to reddit feels like.

But reddit feedback was awesome. Here are a couple quotes:

Very cool, as a full time C# .NET(ASP.NET & Winforms) developer I 
have only recently tried Mono with a console application I'm writing
and have loved it so far. I was reluctant to delve into running an 
ASP.NET application through but with this I'm definitely going to 
give it a go.

and

Hell yes, this saves me from having to learn node.js

The article also made it up to the top of Hackernews. Over there @averyj of TekPub fame did a nice job of summarizing what he felt were the cool features in Manos.

Just from reading through it quickly it includes the following 
things I believe are absent in all of the above (although I have 
only worked with ASP.NET MVC and MonoRail).

1) It has a built in web-server. This is hugely awesome, 
    especially since it is based on Tornado. No mucking with 
    Apache or Nginx, CGI, etc.

 2) It includes command line app generation and compilation
    - missing from at least ASP.NET MVC.

 3) Simple Routing - did you look at the route and lamba? 
     That is awesome.

  Some of what is here is similar to what exists, but this looks 
  much improved. Pipes looks to be an improvement over the 
  current HttpModules of ASP.NET. The view engine looks like 
  an improvement over .aspx. The HTML5 template looks like an 
  improvement over the crappy templates that MVC creates.

The ‘this is awesome’ posts are nice, but things like this are really cool, because you can tell javery really understands why Manos is going to be awesome.

On top of all that, Manos now has around 160 github watchers. Thats more than any of the projects in the mono repository, including mono itself.

Probably the biggest endorsement of all came last night. While I was working away, I received an email from someone who wanted to give me money to buy domain names for the project. Boom, 20 minutes later he paypal’d me the money.

So it seems like people like the idea.

Renewed Vigor

This makes hacking on Manos late at night much more exciting. Its cool to know people actually want to use Manos or at least play with it.

I’ll be working on Manos full time for the first two weeks of October. This should give me enough time to get a fairly polished release out. It should include a bunch of fixes to the core pieces and some new features based on feedback. I’ve also got some ideas for a new IO setup that will significantly improve performance.

The big piece is the template engine though. I’ve been agonizing over what to do here and after talking to some friends, I think I’m just bike shedding. The template engine I have now is pretty awesome, I just need to rework some things. So there should be a nice template engine in the release too.

I’ve also done the work to get Manos packaged properly once Mono 2.8 is out. I’ve setup RPM spec files for Suse and I think I have sufficiently bribed Jo Shields for Ubuntu packages.

So thanks for all the feedback guys. And remember if you want to get involved with the project you can watch/fork it on github at http://github.com/jacksonh/manos and you can subscribe to the google group here: http://groups.google.com/group/manos-de-mono