Developing and Deploying Grurrah

Grurrah.com is run on a single linode virtual server. The virtual server is running open suse 10.3. I am using apache2, mod_mono, mysql (with the MySql .net connector), and memcachedto actually run the site. I am also using a couple of open source libraries. For all the AJAX support I am using Gaia Ajax Widgets, for authentication I am using a MySqlMembershipProvider and MysqlRoleProvider, and I am also experimenting with the UrlRewriterNet.

I haven't deployed the UrlRewriting stuff yet because it required that I add a missing property to Mono's System.Web, and it's a bit of a deployment hassle. I think it's best to forget about url rewriting for awhile, since it's side effects will slow down development. Url rewriting is a feature I have been planning from the beginning though, I think one of the best things about wikipedia is that I can just type what I want right in the firefox address bar, and go where I expect. I plan on something like grurrah.com/grurrahs/Compost working in the future.

With the exception of the one little issue with UrlRewriterNet, I've been able to download, compile, develop and test on Windows and deploy straight to linux/mono without any problems. Normally I don't develop on windows, but for this project it just made sense to use the Visual Web Developer. Once things are a little further along and more of the development effort is focused on backend stuff, I hope I'll be able to go back to developing on Linux, since it's much more familiar to me.

I remember when I first started working on Mono, one of our main goals was to make development on Windows using third party libraries and deploying to Linux possible. Five years later, it's not only possible, it's easy.