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Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails
CWmike writes "Friday Microsoft will demonstrate integration between its new Silverlight browser plug-in and Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's John Lam, a program manager in the dynamic language runtime team, said in a recent blog item: 'Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn't a more real Ruby program than Rails.' Also at the event, Microsoft officials will demonstrate IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application."
Embrace, extend,.... now wait for it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
From the article:
"The IronRuby project in general has featured processes that make it easier for Microsoft to develop open-source projects, said Lam.
"What we learn from building IronRuby will be applied in other product groups to help us become more open and transparent than we have been in the past," Lam said."
How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?
Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I thought it was a dude on a bicycle, cycling towards me and leaning right a bit into a corner. Maybe a lady on a bicycle, actually.
How will any software engineer worth there salt take silverlight seriously now?
But then I gotta give it to MS, they know how to do business.
I confess I don't know a lot about Ruby on Rails, but I've looked into it once or twice. I thought Rails was a Server-Side technology for creating dynamic websites? I thought SilverLight is a Flash-clone, for implementing client side interfaces and rich media playback? Is Microsoft talking about a SilverLight-based user-interface which connects to a Rails backend running on the server? Or actually Rails running in the browser? What benefits would Rails in the browser bring you?
Also, slightly off-topic, but is anyone else concerned about the security implications of pushing more and more languages/capabilities/functionality into the web browser, which can be controlled by scripts/code loaded from remote, un-trusted, servers? Why can't a web browser just be a web browser?
is there an actual story here?
when MS USES Ruby and then actually contributes ANYTHING with a license that isn't viral, report back.
Was nothing learned in the Java fiasco? Do you trust Microsoft to be kinder to Mono than they were to Sun when Microsoft holds the patents this time? Moonlight is a colossal waste of time because Microsoft will never let it thrive on or off their platform.
Ooooo, aaahh, dude.....um, yeah. Uh, some folks here are a bit sensitive about that....if you know what I mean....
MS' ass is still bleeding from the reaming over Java.
I went to Silverlight's site:
./Silverlight.exe ./Silverlight.exe: cannot execute binary file
http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/
Allowed the site in no-script.
Hit the "click to install" button.
And it downloaded a file called "silverlight.exe"
I clicked on it, and Firefox asked me to choose an application to open it.
I opened a terminal, and here's the results.
[mike@orion ~]$ l Silverlight.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mike mike 1427520 2008-06-02 18:23 Silverlight.exe
[mike@orion ~]$ chmod 775 Silverlight.exe
[mike@orion ~]$
bash:
[mike@orion ~]$
[mike@orion ~]$
So, what's MSFT's point again?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Boss: were have a problem. how do we get a persistence API for our silverlight environment?
Young turk: I know! we could tie the rail and silverlight APIs
Crusty the Unix programmer: yes you could, but then you'd have two problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ruby is interesting and all, but I would hardly call its "buzzword" presence in the private sector "commanding". I don't think I'd even venture so far as to call it "significant".
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Why pick Ruby unless they're just trying to look trendy.
Marketing towards a group (trend whore web designers) of people that switch technologies more often than than undies won't help your technology take off. Certainly when these people usually have shit programming skills so their advocacy for these new technologies never go that far.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think that something like JavaScript, where the DOM can be manipulated dynamically to create more dynamic webpages, is necessarily a bad thing, or Ajax where data can be sent to the browser to render into the DOM. There could, potentially, be the chance for there to be some kind of buffer overflow in the browser that attackers could exploit - but that is potentially even a problem with straight html + images. I just have to trust the browser developer to do a decent job of coding securely, and to fix found exploits quickly. I'm pretty confident with Mozilla's ability to do that, as well as Apple (Safari), Opera, Konq, etc. Even to some extent Microsoft.
My problem is this concept of putting full-fledged programming languages with full access to the
I don't mind something like Flash or SilverLight if it only lets developers draw stuff on screen, receive mouse/keyboard events, and play sounds, but I don't like the idea of stuff I load from the Internet having access to system calls. That's just scary.
Help them recover it, use silverlight.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Kinda reminds me of this comic.
But now we've got AJAX this and Flash that. The main culprit is Google. They're pushing Google Apps and documents to (1) show more ads, and (2) unseat Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. You can also put some blame on Adobe, who's trying to make Flash and Flex be a full programming platform. Put all that together, and that's why you have Microsoft responding as they are.
I hope no one thinks Microsoft is trying to help anyone other than themselves with this initiative.
Mac OS X:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/silverlight.html
Well, that right there satisfies 'cross platform' as far as I'm concerned. I mean sure, it might not run on -every platform- but very few things that call themselves cross-platform run on my Amiga.
Of course, this is slashdot, so by cross-platform you must mean does it run on linux... and apparenty the implementation that DOES is called Moonlight...
Linux:
http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
Does that count as cross platform support too? Personally, I think it does. After all, lots of FLOSS software is developed by a core team of developers on one platform, some even are only developed for one distro, and the ports to other platforms and distros are managed by completely other independant groups, yet we don't deny them being cross platform.
I've been following RoR for a while and plan to get into it when I get back into web dev. One thing I've noticed is that the RoR community has quite a few Mac users, and a large number of people who follow web standards and place a lot of emphasis on usability. Microsoft and Silverlight seem like something to avoid for many of these people and it seems weird (or perhaps desperate) for Microsoft to think they are going make any headway into this community.
Only thing is, it wasn't Java the language, it was Sun the corporation behind Java that sued Microsoft. Now tell me, which is the big corporation behind Ruby with deep enough pockets to face Microsoft at the courts?
I notice we already have the embraceextendextinguish tag on the story, but is there really a story here? Looks to me more like a slashvertisement. Ooh, MS wants to merge some unnecessary proprietary* crap with a trendy-but-flakey web rad system. Why should I or anyone care? And if they want to get the word out, why don't they pay the normal advertising rates rates like anyone else? Why is this news for nerds?
*Yes, I know about moonlight, but this clearly says silverlight, and the two have not yet been shown to be compatible. Plus, both require a huge, ugly back end to be installed. There isn't enough money in the world to persuade me to install mono on my servers or even my clients. And I'm certainly not interested in locking out our customers by requiring them to have silverlight/moonlight installed.
"So, what's MSFT's point again?"
Swallow you whole into MS's Monoculture.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The actual news in question is that IronRuby, a .NET implementation of Ruby, successfully hosted an unmodified copy of Rails and dispatched some simple requests through it.
The only connection with silverlight is that the DLR and IronRuby will ship with the Silverlight 2.0 SDK (it's in Beta1 right now). Microsoft will continue to improve both IronRuby and IronPython, and enabling it to be used to script silverlight content.
Nothing to see here people. Move along.
MS' ass is still bleeding from the reaming over Java.
MS accomplished what they set out to do with Java. They turned it into a non-entity for web(applets, not server) and desktop applications. The real fault lies with Sun though. All MS did was make extensions that made MS JRE(available only for Windows) run way faster and better than Sun Java(available for all major platforms). Developers started using those extensions because it made applets way faster and zippy compared to Sun Java.Sun realized this quite a bit late, sued MS and got a nice settlement close to a billion, but that made MS drop Java like a hot potato and go with .NET(they had plans for .NET from way earlier though, but dropping of MS Java was triggered by the lawsuit). This is why suddenly you couldn't download a runtime from MS and had to download only from java.sun.com.
I can't say I'm not happy with the result though. The JRE makes any decent machines go down on its knees when it starts and occupies a huge chunk of RAM for itself. It's as if suddenly 80% of your RAM and CPU are gone once the JRE starts. I remember running Azureus for a while on a 256MB laptop and waiting for minutes for Opera to show me web pages. Once I found a decent BT client that didn't use Java, I dumped Java apps(including OO.o :/ ) except for occasional Yahoo! Games. I hear it's better now, but like Lotus Notes, if it was once horrible, the new version can only be barely usable. Java is relegated to the backend of servers, calculating business logic and serving web apps, though .NET seems to be overtaking Java there too.
This space for rent.
Having a large share of the browser market doesn't necessarily mean you control it -- not when the majority of Web companies are unwilling to give up the other segment of their potential audience. If you'd said that Microsoft controls the intranet, I could maybe believe that... but between PDF and Flash, you could argue that Adobe controls more of the Web than Microsoft does.
Breakfast served all day!
The actual news in question is that IronRuby, a .NET implementation of Ruby, successfully hosted an unmodified copy of Rails and dispatched some simple requests through it.
The only connection with silverlight is that the DLR and IronRuby will ship with the Silverlight 2.0 SDK (it's in Beta1 right now). Microsoft will continue to improve both IronRuby and IronPython, and enabling it to be used to script silverlight content.
Nothing to see here people. Move along.
The legal MS extensions to Java, the ones in the com.ms.* packages, were fine (well, except for the Morgan Stanley company having their standard java package prefix usurped), and were not what the lawsuit was about. They created Java applications superbly integrated with Windows - but not portable to any other platform, and were perfectly legal. That should have been enough lock in for even Microsoft. But that wasn't good enough for them.
The lawsuit was about their extensions to the java.* core packages - which were expressly forbidden in the license. The license was an actual signed contract. Microsoft tried to argue in court that the contract only applied to Java 1.0, and they could do whatever they wanted with future versions. The court didn't agree.
Having the core Java packages unpolluted is important for making it simple to ensure your application is run anywhere. (Well, except for bugs in native libraries or JVM.) To undo the damage, Sun ended up having to create the 100% Pure Java campaign with a program to check for core extensions.
> So, what's MSFT's point again?
That you're as dense as fucking neutronium and know full well it doesn't work on Linux.
The sad thing is, you probably thought you were being witty.
As I understand it, .NET has good support for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python via special dynamic opcode support. Java doesn't have that yet, but should have a dynamic method call opcode real soon now. Yes, Dynamic languages like Jython already run, and pretty well, but reflection (the obvious way to do a dynamic call) is slow, and machinery to cache and/or avoid it is ugly. Having a dynamic method call opcode that puts all that in the JVM and works for many dynamic lanuages would be an improvement.
Hey, Microsoft - look at us not caring!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
So, they'll do the open source world a favor and extinguish RoR?
I'll by six copies of Vista for that.
The twitter patrol must be on break. I'll take over I guess...
Shut up twitter, ya twat. And your little sockpuppets too.
What you are basically saying is that because you tried to install the plugin for a different platform it isn't cross platform? Hmmm why doesn't firefox-2.0.0.14.tar.gz install properly on my Windows box? I guess Firefox isn't cross platform!
What a dumbass comment.
If you've ever been to a Rails Conf, you would know that the vast majority of Rails developers are Mac heads. Rails Conf looks like a MacWorld show, with at least 95 percent of the laptops sporting the big glowing apple.
We, as a group, hate all that is Microsoft. We will not embrace Silverlight.
Yes, there are a few Windoids out there coming over to the Rails camp, but we try to avoid them until they switch to Mac, and have been away from Microsoft long enough for the smell to die down a bit.
It's dual-platform. Dual platform is hardly equivilant to running on everything but your amiga.
Does that count as cross platform support too? Personally, I think it does.
Only because you haven't tried it.
This space intentionally left blank
It's dual-platform. Dual platform is hardly equivilant to running on everything but your amiga.
Ah, so if it was Windows + Linux, would you accept that it was cross-platform? Lots of software out there for linux with a windows port, but no Mac port... all calling itself cross-platform.
Seems a strange double standard.
Silverlight is a primarily a modern desktop browser flash-alternative technology. And its already available on the 2 primary modern desktop platforms, with beta support on the 3rd... there's a lot of "cross platform" software out there that isn't anywhere near this far along.
Hell, OpenOffice.org was less cross platform than silverlight in VERY recent memory. Sure it was 'available' for OSX, but you had to install X, and even then it was BARELY usable.
Only because you haven't tried it.
Its also not finished yet, and they are entirely upfront about that fact. However there is nothing preventing it from being finished, and indeed every indication it will be.
Nice, I was looking all weekend for a way to run RoR in IIS, and this seems to be the best way.
Specially after installing Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter crashed my server, so I had to remove it.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Hm, remember MS and Java? It needed a court ruling to prevent MS from "redefining" Java for their own marketing needs. I fear the worst for Ruby ...
We're going off the Rails on a crazy train?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Running on Windows and Mac infers nothing like that. You could have completely separate codebases for each. You could be relying on tons of platform specific libraries for each and catering to them with an "if it's win do this, if it's mac do this" precompiler directive or the like. You could be including code that's not portable to other OS's for each, all sorts of craziness. We'll never know because we don't have ANY idea what's under the hood nor if it's portable.
At least with a Linux port you know what kind of interface it's expecting from a library and how that library's implementation works.
"Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails"
You just called me "Ruby on Rails". Try writing proper English:
"Microsoft Linking Silverlight to Ruby on Rails".
Not really. Being able to run on Linux implies a few very important things that are hard to avoid - you have to be using a free software license or at least libraries that are free (even like LGPL).
No. You don't. You can write 100% completely proprietary software for linux: Quake 4. Maya. Acrobat Distiller. There is nothing remotely approaching or connected to free about these. They might run on BSD; they might not. They might
That means porting it to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy because the code is guaranteed to be accessible by license.
The license could be your standard off the shelf EULA you'd see with any "Windows" software.
Porting to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy for it proprietary owners... maybe. If they felt like it. Don't hold your breath.
... I won't trust anybody with Rich Client technologies further than I can throw them. Be it Adobe, Curl, Wild Tangent, or - heavens forbid - Microsoft. Take that from an experienced Flash Application Developer. For years and years now Adobe has been keeping Linux on a short leash. Allways coming up late, now, once again, limiting proposed hardware acceleration and certain functions to certain host OSes, ect.
I like Flash and it's a remarkable asset. But I've never fully trusted these guys and my trust in them isn't growing.
Yet it looks as though after 10 years Sun is finally getting serious at attempting move towards RIA territory. If JavaFX is halfway decent, it could actually become the new king of all things RIA we've all been waiting for. If the core components of it are open source and the reference implementations aswell, then we're all set for a bright new future of RIAs.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What else is new with MS? They'll do anything they possibly can to trick users into adopting their technologies so as to shut out competitors and lock people into their products... As troll-ish as I sound, after years and years of watching this same behaviour, it's just getting really old..
So Silverlight - a client-side technology - can talk to Rails (a backend technology)? Well, whoop-e-doo.
All this tells us is that Silverlight can speak HTTP, which I should bloody well hope it can if it's going to be any use for making RIAs.
This being so, *any* server-side technology can communicate with Silverlight: 1) client-side app makes a request over HTTP; 2) server-side-tech-of-your-choice responds to request; 3) oh-so-smart client side app recieves response from server and displays result to user.
Where, pray, is the news in this? It's just a lot of buzzwords to make Silverlight - that decade-late Flash-killa - seem more up-to-the-minute. That you can write your client-side code in IronRuby is a completely separate, but handily blurry, issue.
What are the legal implications of running Ruby on dot.NET and why would you want to do such a thing?
davecb5620@gmail.com
I'd pay money to see a logfile of you executing javac.exe on Linux.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
Please reference cbrocious where he says "The DLR and IronRuby are released under the MS-PL which is OSI-approved." MS-PL is essentially like the BSD license meaning even if Microsoft stops supporting IronRuby, the community can continue development just like it does with most open-source projects.
I'm no lawyer but the license is royalty-free, world-wide, and non-exclusive, and seems to be irrevocable based on section 3D.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/publiclicense.mspx
MS-Public License:
1. Definitions
The terms âoereproduce,â âoereproduction,â âoederivative works,â and âoedistributionâ have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law.
A âoecontributionâ is the original software, or any additions or changes to the software.
A âoecontributorâ is any person that distributes its contribution under this license.
âoeLicensed patentsâ are a contributorâ(TM)s patent claims that read directly on its contribution.
2. Grant of Rights
(A) Copyright Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.
(B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.
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3. Conditions and Limitations
(A) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you rights to use any contributorsâ(TM) name, logo, or trademarks.
(B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.
(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.
(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
(E) The software is licensed âoeas-is.â You bear the risk of using it. The contributors give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, the contributors exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
"you don't HAVE to have the full .NET framework for sliverlight".
If you have installed it all, how do you know these more dangerous API calls are unavailable?
except that, instead of launching a nuclear war, the real Skynetdot's first reaction would be :
"- Lol, I haz a beowulf cluster !!11!oneone"
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
the thought of steve ballmer or bill gates in drag comes to mind with that comment.
I'm now permanently asexual as a result.
What gets me is the patents on such things. Take the MPEG movie compression techniques. Without digital compression, the VideoCD WOULD NOT EXIST. Without MPEG2, the DVD would not exist. We would have had "DVDs" that were the size of laserdisks.
So the movie production would have still have had to continue with the bulky, error-prone and expensive production of VHS tape. Trailers would not exist on the web. Adverts would therefore have to be completely off the internet, meaning that a niche product would not be cost-effective to advertise.
So if the movie industry hadn't had digital movie compression, they would have been running a greater loss. Not to mention that re-buying VHS movies in DVD was a huge windfall...
So it would have been eminently suitable for the movie companies to get together, require a digital archive format and (necessarily) compression algorithms and then pay for the best solution to this problem.
MPEG2.
So why the need for "compression algorithms" to be patented?
MPEG4 enables better quality video to be compressed much more, making the movie advertisement much cheaper and making HD video a possibility. So without this, a loss to the companies. Eminently sufficient inducement for MPEG4 to be created without patents.
Hey, while we're wishing, how about some more items for your list?
Have I missed anything?
Do quake4, Maya, Acrobat, don't use libc (you know... libraries that are free)? The implemented all of the C libraries from scratch, did they?
Do quake4, Maya, Acrobat, don't use libc (you know... libraries that are free)? The implemented all of the C libraries from scratch, did they?
What difference would that make to your argument?
Virtually all software of any complexity written on ANY platform makes use of "free" libraries. If a free library that does what you need exists it makes sense to use it. That doesn't make an application cross platform.
The infestation of add-ons reveals the browser suffering from a great deal of ineptitude. The situation is kind of like a car with no stereo; why not just include the stereo in the car? Silverlight (flash, etc.) will be even less relevant as more capabilities return to the browser. On a side note, why do you think there is no SVG support in IE8?