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Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the how-does-miguel-get-to-be-a-vp dept.

El Lobo writes "The Mono open-source project will create a Linux version of Silverlight by the end of year, said Miguel de Icaza, a Novell vice president and head of Mono. Asked about plans for Linux, Microsoft executives have been non-committal, saying that it will depend on demand. But de Icaza, who is attending Mix, was able to commit without hesitating."

7 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. It's easy to commit... by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 5, Insightful

    when you don't have any customers depending on it.

    --

    --

    WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
  2. Now we only need a name by miguel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sebastien Pouliot suggested we call it "Moonlight" (anagram on Mono).

    And I was thinking Silver-light in another language, bonus points if the script is good looking.

    For instance, in Arabic it would be fad-da daw' ( ) which looks cool on a large font(thanks to Hisham Bardam for the translation) although it does not roll easily. We might need some shortening.

    Miguel.

    1. Re:Now we only need a name by NaCh0 · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know Miguel, I was thinking the same thing. Software names on linux are not obscure enough. Picking a name that can't even be written in latin characters would be the pinnacle of l337ness. Faddadaw' will conquer the market for sure.

    2. Re:Now we only need a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      How about keeping the "mono" in there. You could call it "Monopolight" maybe.

  3. Re:ffs by markh100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Agreed. The vitriolic tone of this thread is somewhat astonishing to me. I'm primarily a Windows/.NET developer that is slowly working towards migrating to a Linux platform, and the Mono project is one of the key technologies leading me in that direction. When Microsoft announced that Silverlight was going to be a cross-platform technology that only ran on Windows and Apple, I was extremely frustrated. I can understand why, strategically, Microsoft has chosen not to implement a Silverlight implementation on Linux, but I cannot understand why the majority of those commenting on this thread are arguing so vehemently against Miguel.

    Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in .NET is a pleasure, and a can gaurantee you that coding for the Silverlight platform is going to be infinitely more organized and structured than coding for Flash. Website developers are going to flock to this new technology. Without a Linux implementation of Silverlight, 20% of websites will be completely inaccessible to Linux users in 5 years.

  4. One for the negative nancies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Web Projects Using Mono

            * Fiducial (http://fiducial.biz): Their new site uses Mono and ASP.NET.

            * Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org): WikiPedia uses Mono for its search facilities. The indexing and the actual searching is done by Mono-based applications.

            * GovTrack.Us (http://www.govtrack.us/)

            * GotMono.Net (http://www.gotmono.net)

            * Yakugo.com (http://www.yakugo.com) is an AJAX-based English-Japanese dictionary site that uses Mono.

            * [1] (http://www.saileventschedule.de) A web-based schedule for sailing events like racing and training.

    More can be found at:
    http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono#W ho_uses_Mono.3F

  5. Re:ffs by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's only a useful piece of technology if you want to abandon the UNIX programming environment and switch to one that's based on the Windows API and isolates you from all the rest of the UNIX tools you're used to.


    When was the last time that you used the "UNIX programming environment" in your web browser? Last I checked, you had to write in a subset that isoaltes you from the operating system and only allowed DOM access and Javascript.

    Flash, the other major tool for RIAs, does not give you access to *any* Unix facilities.

    You seem to be confused as to what Silverlight is.

    One of the nice things about Silverlight (as I pointed out in a blog entry a few weeks ago) is that you can actually generate Silverlight content with any Unix tool you want.

    You can easily generate it with PHP:

    header ("Content-Type: application/xaml");
    print "

    ";

    Or you can generate it with shell, perl, python or assembly language.

    The server side is probably as Unixy as anything else can get.