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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."
It works on Safari on Mac OS, and might be useful to have when the Linux support is done too. Heck, it's early even for use on Windows. Things only get moderately interesting for me once Silverlight 2 is done, and it isn't yet for any platform.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The upshot is that you should also be able to run IronRuby on the Mono Common Language Runtime, presuming that Microsoft's implementation adheres to it's own ECMA-"approved" CLR standards...
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?
quote from the mono project FAQ (http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General): "The Mono API today is somewhere in between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0, see our Roadmap for details about what is implemented."
.Net framework is 3.5.
.NET on anything else than Windows. Let's get real and see that the Mono or Moonlight projects are just PR... thanks.
while looking at the MS website it seems that the latest
frankly at this point I would seriously doubt that MS (or Novell, for that matter) has any serious intention of implementing
anybody needs my tinfoil hat?
I had another sig before, but this one is better
Not only that, the DLR and IronRuby are both released under the MS-PL, which is OSI-approved. If anything depends on proprietary libraries, it can be swapped out with a free alternative.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
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.
The world is trendy, they're just going where the money is. If people say "we want Ruby", they'll deliver. .NET is a platform made to support multiple language, and aside when core mechanics are required (dynamic vs static language), making a new language on top of the CLR is actually not all that much work. So today its C#, Python and Ruby.... tomorrow it will be language XYZ.... a language is a fairly insignificant thing in this day and age: its all about the platform.
They want it so that no matter which language you prefer, you can use their technology, for better or worse. It is quite a brilliant really. Why should the language be tied to the platform anyway? That I pick native compilation, the Java runtime, or the CLR.... I should still be able to use the language I want.
(Side note: I despise Ruby. Doesn't mean I think it shouldn't be offered as an option...)
Reminds me of when years ago i worked in a pizza restaurant. I was cleaning the food prep counters and beneath the insert. I went to reinsert an insert, but the railing to support it had vanished. I hailed out, "One of my rails is missing!".
The supervisor replied "Are we talking... DRUGS... here?"
Naively, i couldn't respond. Later, someone told me "rails" referred to needles, i guess as in shooting up.
So, ever since Ruby on Rails came out, i've always recalled the "rails" context. Now, msoft with silverlight and rails.... sounds like self-injecting mercury into the bloodstream...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I still remember when most users were using Netscape browsers and Microsoft had a pitiful browser they wanted everyone to use instead. Many technical users pointed out that Netscape was cross-platform and a better choice for a browser. So, Microsoft created Internet Explorer for Macs, Unix and Windows to show that Microsoft understood the importance of a cross-platform browser and would continue to make the browser for all platforms for free. Once they propagated their browser to the bulk of the users, these cross-platform versions stopped being updated. Of course, it was all just a ploy to gain market dominance by confusing the marketplace.
I wish people were smart enough to realize that this latest attempt to tie Ruby to Microsoft is simply the same tactic, used repeatedly by Microsoft, to confuse a marketplace while jamming more poorly conceived Microsoft software into businesses that are not clever enough to look further into the future than the current quarter. Sadly, past examples show that business managers will not learn that Microsoft does not have the best of intentions when they announce any new technology.
An odd detail for you... In 2000-ish, I worked for a startup with a Java-based server application. It ran significantly faster on really cheap NT hardware using Sun's JVM than it did on really expensive Solaris hardware using Sun's JVM.
You can't really blame that on MS.
- chrish