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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"?
Ummm, actually it isn't, because Silverlight encompasses a lot more then just a subset of WPF and XAML. There are related technologies, particularly related to multimedia, around Silverlight, Windows Media in particular, that are very much a part of creating Silverlight content as we see it now on Microsoft platforms. Everyone else is going to have to replicate that, and even worse, keep up with the moving target of successive implementations. It's another classic example of Microsoft keeping their implementation ahead, and first to market, and it's a well worked routine now.
I'd love to be able to say otherwise, but these 'olive branches' that we're seeing are all designed to get the usage of Microsoft technology on the web to some sort of critical mass. Nothing more. If that is ever achieved, your guess is as good as mine as to whether those branches will stay strong and whether Microsoft will ever have a continued, vested interest in Moonlight or Ruby or Rails. I just find what people say around these stories fascinating. There's all sorts of articles and blog entries written by various people about how Microsoft is changing or asking "Is Microsoft changing?", "Is Microsoft Open Sourcing....." etc. etc. It's ridiculous.
At the moment, I'm trying to get over to a female acquaintance why it's a bad idea to get back together with exes. She persists in believing that it's better the second, third or fourth time around and that things will change. Nothing ever does change though. Any apparent change you think you see is short-lived, a leopard doesn't change it's spots and if it ever was going to happen, well, it would have happened by now. You can't get past someone's history, their history is their problem not yours and you only end up getting used.
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
As opposed to, hm, Apple, which definitely does not want to benefit primarily Apple customers. Which is why iTunes has been released for Linux... ??
Plus, open source people definitely want, primarily, to benefit people that don't use open source.
Seriously. What business DOESN'T want to bring better value to their customers? If your object is to benefit people that aren't your customers, your company (or your investors) won't last long.
If you're going to flame Microsoft, do it on good grounds.
Help them recover it, use silverlight.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
If history has taught us anything, it's that people are just not going to ask themselves pointless questions like that.
You don't get a choice. You have to deal with whatever comes down, and what comes down will have pretty much all been created on Windows systems. The key thing to remember hear is that people are not writing content for Moonlight. They are writing it for Silverlight. If it stops working on Moonlight they're simply not going to care when it boils down to it.
Really? These are well worked standard tactics from the past twenty-five years. Do they really need to keep being explained?
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?
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!
There's two main versions of the .NET CLR (Runtime): 1.1, and 2.0. .NET 1.1 runs on .NET CLR 1.1 .NET 2.0 through to .NET 3.5 runs on .NET CLR 2.0
So far, so good.
Effectively, .NET 3.0 and 3.5 were language extensions on top of 2.0. They still execute ontop of the same CLR.
They weren't "language extensions". .NET 3.0 contains solely library extensions: WPF, WCF, Cardspace, Workflow Foundation, on top of .NET 2.0. .NET 3.5 contains library extensions, primarily LINQ (in its various guises) and additions to the BCL (e.g. System.TimeZoneInfo). I believe there are ASP.NET and ADO.NET enhancements too, but I haven't looked into them. .NET 3.5 also contains the compilers for C#3 and VB9. More on them in a minute.
.NET 2.0SP1, which includes some changes and enhancements to the BCL, such as System.DateTimeOffset.
It's also worth mentioning
If memory serves, Mono has recently announced full feature compliance against .NET 1.1, and they're now targetting full feature compliance against .NET 2.0.
.NET 3.5 apps won't run. It just means certain bits (such as LINQ, WPF, WCF, Anonymous Types, etc) are either not present or not completely implemented yet.
That doesn't mean
Anonymous types are a purely language feature. They don't need any support from the runtime or the libraries. In other words, you can compile a C# 3 app which uses anonymous types, and it will work on Mono (assuming there's nothing else missing, of course). Most C# 3 features fall into this category - they don't need library or runtime support.
.NET 2.0 was fully released, IIRC). However, you can build an app with the MS C# 3 compiler and run it against the Mono platform so long as you don't use any library functionality which isn't supported there. Asking VS2008 to target .NET 2.0 is a good starting point on that front. (It actually targets .NET 2.0SP1, so be careful...)
WPF and WCF are libraries. No language changes are needed, although tooling to support XAML is useful, of course.
LINQ is a mixture of many elements. To use "out of process" queries you need an implementation of expression trees (and compiler support). To use LINQ to Objects you need an implementation of that, but it can be completely separate to the rest of the main platform libraries (see http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/linqbridge.html for example). You can use C# 3 query expressions with no runtime/library support, so long as you've got a C# 3 compiler and a type with suitable methods (or properties).
Last time I looked, mcs support for C# 3 features was somewhat lacking (which surprises me, as Mono had a released version of mcs with C# 2 feature support before
See http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/Chapter1/Versions.aspx for more details on the MS versions available, although that doesn't cover Mono.
In either case, Silverlight/Moonlight are seperate from the .NET / Mono codebases. Yes, they have shared code, however since Silverlight 2.0 is a vastly cut down version of the .NET Framework.
This makes full feature compliance of Silverlight 2.0 by the Moonlight crowd that much easier, since the majority of the functionality that is used in Silverlight is already implemented in Mono
... 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