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."

Comments

"Version of xxx"

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Embrace, extend,.... now wait for it.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[mark72005]

...exaggerate?

Re:"Version of xxx"

[jnadke]

Microsoft:
1. "We love Silverlight!"
2. "We love Ruby!"
3. "We love Ruby so much, we're making Ruby.NET***!"
4. "Hey look, Silverlight and Ruby.NET play together!"
5. "Hey everyone, develop for Silverlight and Ruby.NET!"
**Everyone embraces Silverlight and Ruby.NET**
6. "We're discontinuing Ruby.NET, please refer to Silverlight."

***Not compatible with normal Ruby

P.S. Oddly enough, my CAPTCHA today is "strategy". Intelligence perhaps?

Re:"Version of xxx"

[AnyoneEB]

P.S. Oddly enough, my CAPTCHA today is "strategy". Intelligence perhaps?

Yes, actually Slashdot has a learning algorithm where it uses the topic and thread to determine which word to use for the CAPTCHA and checks the post for references to the CAPTCHA to see if it guessed correctly. Eventually this will evolve into autotagging and the ability of Slashdot to respond to comments on its own followed shortly thereafter by the Slashdot webserver achieving sentience.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[debackerl]

"Not compatible with normal Ruby" Yes it will, since they want to support Ruby on Rails. If you can run Ruby on Rails, you got a very good implementation.

"We're discontinuing Ruby.NET, please refer to Silverlight." Firstly, it is IronRuby ;) (Ruby.NET is a non-Microsoft program). Secondly, IronRuby could not really be discontinued since it is open-source. So you will always have the right to compile it yourself. It has nothing to do with a proprietary software that is discontinued and can't be ported to new platforms. Just take a look at IronPython. The open-source community has create a spin-off called IronPython Community Edition.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[Zarf]

embrace is spelled with an x? When you do it right... you can't help but spell it that way.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[SgtPepper]

Two points:

1) John Lam has stated that IronRuby is Ruby first. The goal is to run real ruby programs, .NET interop is secondary.

2) IronRuby is published under the MS-PL an OSI-approved license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html) if they start to get persnickety the community will just fork it.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[SgtPepper]

Ruby.NET was something totally different (http://rubydotnet.googlegroups.com/web/Home.htm) and was actually a community based project started by Dr. Wayne Kelly (who is know helping with IronRuby).

Re:"Version of xxx"

[Ilgaz]

Already happened. MS advertises Silverlight 2 beta heavily while there is no OS X version of it on sight. Linux/FreeBSD? It is up to their lover, Icaza if they share specs.

They even time it wrong, this game should have started after crashing Flash with questionable deals (like Olympics), not before it is taken serious, even by them.

Well, while they are playing their rich kid games, I already bought my first Adobe Air based commercial application. Upgrade to Earth Browser ( http://www.earthbrowser.com/ ) and I already made "Adobe Media Player" on machines a default install, Windows and OS X.

Let them keep playing with Ruby and newbie geeks minds. Adobe Air is already up and running.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[notaprguy]

It's worth noting that Microsoft has a stronger history of supporting multiple programming languages than pretty much any other company. Yes, they have a key platform in .NET that they want developes to use but developers have a wide range of choices of languages; VB, C#, Python, Ruby, hell even COBOL as well as dozens of others.

Re:"Version of xxx"

[SoopahMan]

Not in this case.

Microsoft deserves this reputation, but .Net is an exception because of the Mono team. The Mono team has already shown in several cases that regardless of the direction Microsoft goes with .Net, if it doesn't help Mono's open source goals, they go their own way and are really unaffected by Microsoft's lesser decisions. At the same time they absolutely gain where Microsoft makes beneficial decisions, including in the creation of .Net itself.

At this point the .Net box is open and there's no turning that train around, even with the lowest actions Microsoft could (and may) consider.

"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Lumenary7204]

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"?

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Gnavpot]

How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?

And why do they need to be more transparent? These guys gave us windows. What can be more transparent than that?

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Chris Burke]

How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?

Same way you make your own life transparent when guests come over: By hiding everything you don't want anyone to see in your bedroom closet, sweeping all the dust under the rug, and pretending like your largely empty but tidy living room where the guests are allowed is always that way.

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Hankapobe]

How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?

And why do they need to be more transparent? These guys gave us windows. What can be more transparent than that?

Baddabump - tchsh.

That was the comic stylings of Gnavpot. He'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.

Up next, Steve Balmer and his chair act.

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Lumenary7204]

Except in the EU, a "Health Inspector" is liable to come-a-visiting and take a peek into that closet and look under your rug:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080221-eu-to-ms-well-believe-it-when-we-see-it.html

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[Mateo_LeFou]

It's quite simple: You start attaching the word "transparent" to all of your proprietary, trade-secretive, obscure-as-hell protocols. Look for Microsoft Transparent Office XML coming to a standards body near you!

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[davidsyes]

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...

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[hostyle]

Opening the curtains a tad? Removing the shutters? Putting in less stained glass next time. Oh right ... different windows

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[slimjim8094]

I dunno, a wet tee-shirt?

Just not on Balmer. OH GOD MY EYES!!!

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[celtic_hackr]

It's really simple. Anything new that Microsoft does is bound to be more transparent. Since they can't be any less, or equally, transparent. They have already achieved maximum non-transparency. Ergo, they can never be as non-transparent as they once were. So, once again, M$ has given us a "You are in a helicopter" statement - correct but useless.

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[davidsyes]

Well, that just goes to show you how little i know about durgs.... ummm, drugs...

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[alexborges]

They make an impossibly expensive OS (900+ for vista ult), that needs an incredible ammount of resources to accomplish, precisely, the hypernecessary and indispensable transparency effect on a menu.

The Microsoft Way. You gotta love the guys.

Re:"Learn How to Become" More Transparent?

[SgtPepper]

How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"? Painfully, with community push, things like the IronRuby project and groups like Alt.NET really are slowly changing the way Microsoft operates. Tell me ScottGu would have been where he is now 10 years ago at MS.

What's MSFTs Point?

[mikelieman]

Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Lumenary7204]

Um... Actually it is:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Microsoft is assisting in Moonlight's development:

http://lwn.net/Articles/248198/

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[turgid]

Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother?

What are you talking about? It runs on all modern versions of Windows.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Vectronic]

Two comments above you...

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=571487&cid=23631965

But I really don't see the last part of it comming, I think Ruby is a little to "Stable" unto itself for Microsoft to really be able to pull it off, Ruby will just continue on...

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Lumenary7204]

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...

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[JoeCommodore]

Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother? What part of Microsoft's "Windows Strategy" did you not hear about?

It has been quoted by Balmer, MSs entry into open source is "to bring better value to OUR customers" (emphasis is mine). If they get RoR developers to make Silverlight front ends, it benefits mainly MS customers (euphemism for MS may make more $ sales) - goal met.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[maxume]

Man, when you accuse a business of trying to make money, you do it with style.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[ranjix]

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."

while looking at the MS website it seems that the latest .Net framework is 3.5.

frankly at this point I would seriously doubt that MS (or Novell, for that matter) has any serious intention of implementing .NET on anything else than Windows. Let's get real and see that the Mono or Moonlight projects are just PR... thanks.

anybody needs my tinfoil hat?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

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.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[pembo13]

If Moonlight == Silverlight does OO.Org == MS Office?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[miffo.swe]

Its as platform independant as Windows applications is with Wine. That some lunatic tries in vain to make a plugin in Mono does not make it platform independant. The current implementation, Moonlight, do not work in its current alpha state and lags heavily behind Silverlight. Note that Moonlight will probably never be able to render silverlight content properly. The other bad thing for Moonlight is that it has a huge patent threat hanging over it so nobody in their right mind touches it with a ten foot pole.

Is Word platform independant because you can run it through Wine? Is MSN an open protocol because people have succeeded reverse engineering it?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Kalriath]

.NET Framework 3.5 is merely .NET Framework 2.0 with an enhanced class library (includes WCF, WPF, and so on). If Mono supports custom .NET classes, it technically is .NET 3.5

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Lumenary7204]

I disagree...

The object of Moonlight is to essentially be a "feature-complete" implementation of Silverlight, minus those pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs.

The question is, then: "Does your Silverlight-based business application really need to use these pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs?"

Which, in the vast majority of cases, is "probably not." Much of this kind of functionality can be had via calls to external (and FOSS) libraries.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[cbrocious]

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.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

The upshot is that you should also be able to run IronRuby on the Mono Common Language Runtime, presuming that Microsoft's implementation continues to adhere to it's own ECMA-"approved" CLR standards...

Fixed that for you.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[spec8472]

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

Effectively, .NET 3.0 and 3.5 were language extensions on top of 2.0. They still execute ontop of the same CLR.

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.

That doesn't mean .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.

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.

As for Moonlight/Mono being just MS PR, I think Miguel De Icaza might have something quite strong to say about that.

- Novell is actually using Mono to implement apps on their Linux desktop.

- Second Life, amongst other reasonably big apps, is using Mono to provide (or improve) pluggable/scriptable functionality in their apps.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[hahn]

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. It sounds like you're blaming the ex. But if you actually got back together a second, third, or fourth time, then she's not the only one who believed that things would be better. And so if you're bitter and cynical now, it's not entirely her fault. Now what were we saying about Microsoft again...? :)

In all seriousness, best wishes in getting over the ex.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Lumenary7204]

Either way... :-)

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[ady1]

Apple never claimed to be OPEN and TRANSPARENT and neither am I aware of any attempt by them to hijack standards.

Have a nice day trolling.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

The object of Moonlight is to essentially be a "feature-complete" implementation of Silverlight, minus those pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs.

Then it's essentially useless because the reference implementation that is first to market is Microsoft's Silverlight, and you can bet your bottom dollar Microsoft's tools will be creating Silverlight content with Windows Media and other components right, left and centre. What comes down in practice is what you have to support.

The question is, then: "Does your Silverlight-based business application really need to use these pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs?"

If history has taught us anything, it's that people are just not going to ask themselves pointless questions like that.

Which, in the vast majority of cases, is "probably not." Much of this kind of functionality can be had via calls to external (and FOSS) libraries.

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?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

It sounds like you're blaming the ex.

Not really. Some people just have a hard time believing that things don't change and people just don't undergo magical life changing transformations ;-).

But if you actually got back together a second, third, or fourth time, then she's not the only one who believed that things would be better. And so if you're bitter and cynical now, it's not entirely her fault. Now what were we saying about Microsoft again...? :)

I'm not entirely sure you got the right end of the stick from what was written, but you've loosely described the concept of being used ;-).

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[slarrg]

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.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[The End Of Days]

That isn't actually a rebuttal, if indeed you even thought it was.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[slashtivus]

I was poking around on the Expression Studio site earlier today (creates Silverlight content / apps) out of curiosity. From the demo videos I saw that it was up to the content creator to choose for themselves which codec etc they want to use, so no, the tools aren't forcing it (wisely so). They want to sell software, therefore they are supporting what they believe the market (read: content creators) wants.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[benwaggoner]

Then it's essentially useless because the reference implementation that is first to market is Microsoft's Silverlight, and you can bet your bottom dollar Microsoft's tools will be creating Silverlight content with Windows Media and other components right, left and centre. What comes down in practice is what you have to support. There's already a huge number of tools that can make Silverlight-compatible media content. Some of these are on Mac, including Telestream's Episode and Flip4Mac. Main Concept is selling a Mac/Win/Linux SDK for encoding WMV content. For audio only applications, Silverlight has native MP3 support.

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. One of the things we're cooperating with Novell on with Moonlight is providing them test and validation suites that are used to test Silverlight internally. So, yes, we're absolutely doing work to make sure it's interoperable.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Gavagai80]

Try actually using Moonlight, then tell me it's cross-platform. Microsoft has been "assisting" for more than a year and it's pre-alpha quality.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[tepples]

If Moonlight == Silverlight does OO.Org == MS Office? Once OOo and Microsoft Office update to ISO's version of ODF and to the latest OpenFormula proposal, yes.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Try actually using Moonlight, then tell me it's cross-platform. Microsoft has been "assisting" for more than a year and it's pre-alpha quality.

Heh, I believe that, but then, try using Silverlight 1.0. It would be generous to call it a beta, and really can't fathom why Microsoft didn't do just that. I mean, if GMail can still be a beta 5 years later, surely the first half-assed version of Silverlight can be fairly called an alpha or a beta or something.

Silverlight 2 seems pretty interesting to me, in the sense that it's good for a lot of the same kinds of things Flash would be good for (and is prone to overuse in the same ways, sigh) but is a shit ton easier to develop for. Silverlight 1? Not so much. Decent if you want to stream video, otherwise you probably should be using something else even if you're a MS fan.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[benwaggoner]

The object of Moonlight is to essentially be a "feature-complete" implementation of Silverlight, minus those pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs.

The question is, then: "Does your Silverlight-based business application really need to use these pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs?"

Which, in the vast majority of cases, is "probably not." Much of this kind of functionality can be had via calls to external (and FOSS) libraries A library can be FOSS, but that doesn't mean that there aren't patents involved.

Really, the sheer breadth and number of patents around video and audio codecs are pretty staggering. It's hard to imagine a competitive codec that was truly patent free; there certainly aren't any that exist. The current leading standardized codecs (with patent pools) outperform the best "patent free" codecs by at least a factor of 2. For video, we're talking about, what, H.263 and Theora, and Vorbis for audio? Those are mid-90's caliber.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[cavebison]

> 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

Hi. Only commenting here because of experience and an urge to offer some hopefully useful advice. You're right insofar as people find it hard to change by themselves. So the ONLY way to go with "trying again" is to seek couples' counselling from a professional. Without counselling it's pointless. With counselling there's a change that understanding will emerge. Also, counselling often reveals things about each individual which can make a person to realise why they are "chasing the unattainable" if that is indeed what is happening.

It's the only way to do and very useful all round. If two people are committed to trying again, they will make the effort to seek counselling together - it's probably the hardest thing they'll ever do together and the most worthwhile for both of them.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[nodan]

Exactly, that's quite the opposite of cross platform.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Westley]

Parent is a somewhat confused post - it contains various facts, but also some misused terminology. I tend to be a bit pedantic when it comes to the terminology around runtime features vs language features vs libraries, as it's a source of frequent miscommunication.

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.

It's also worth mentioning .NET 2.0SP1, which includes some changes and enhancements to the BCL, such as System.DateTimeOffset.

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.

That doesn't mean .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.

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.

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 .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...)

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

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[setagllib]

Out of curiosity, what's a modern audio codec that outperforms Vorbis in compression rates for the same level of fidelity? From all the experimentation I've done, no *popular* codec actually beats Vorbis, but that's not to say I know about and tested every codec available.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[pesc]

You have just explained why we cannot trust Microsoft to provide "cross-platform" technologies. And why, if you are interested in non-Microsoft platforms, you should avoid Microsoft technology.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[nstlgc]

No, .NET 3.0 is merely .NET Framework 2.0 with an enhanced class libraries. .NET 3.5 actually brings new versions of VB.NET and C# and a new version of the Framework (3.5).

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[benwaggoner]

Windows Media Audio 10 Pro and HE AAC both outperform Vorbis dramatically at lower bitrates. You can get quite good audio fidelity at 48 Kbps with either.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[ranjix]

while I appreciate your details, they don't do anything but serve my point: ms doesn't mind having a features gap between mono and .net (since this will push people putting more money in real windows systems on which they have "feature-complete" .net), and in the same time they play the "nice guys" by "allowing" almost-.net stuff on other OSs. for ms this is shooting two birds with one stone.
as for miguel de icaza's opinion, is unimportant, in the sense that he would better believe strongly that what he's doing is not PR, otherwise is a mere idiot or very well paid by MS/Novell. important is ms's opinion (real, if you please), on mono. I would be amazed if it was different than my first paragraph

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[Kalriath]

Noted. I hadn't played with any of the new language extensions in C# 3.5 yet, but from what I've seen it's mostly support for more pointless predicates so it's no big loss not to have.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

From the demo videos I saw that it was up to the content creator to choose for themselves which codec etc they want to use, so no, the tools aren't forcing it (wisely so). They want to sell software...

I don't think you get it. This will continue (and I can only take your word for it at the moment) until Microsoft feels that they have a critical mass of usage for Silverlight. Besides, I'd be very, very surprised if the default wasn't to use and work with Windows Media.

There is past form for this, as Microsoft has been relatively open over many things, including documents formats, until they have a market cornered in terms of people using their technology. By using the phrase "They want to sell software" you make it sound as if Microsoft wants to compete. That's not in their nature, nor in their corporate culture.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[segedunum]

Main Concept is selling a Mac/Win/Linux SDK for encoding WMV content.

That doesn't help open source software's support for it.

Silverlight has native MP3 support.

It might have MP3 support, but you and I both know it's all a question of what people will be using to create their content, and what most people will end up using.

One of the things we're cooperating with Novell on with Moonlight is providing them test and validation suites that are used to test Silverlight internally. So, yes, we're absolutely doing work to make sure it's interoperable.

When a certain level of critical mass has been achieved for Silverlight, that cooperation (and Mac support) will be dropped and left to squander like the hottest potato you've ever seen in you life. Like I said, there is a ton of past form for this sort of thing and reassurances of interoperability are simply not matched up by either past history, or in technologies and markets where you're not behind in terms of widespread usage and critical mass.

Seen it all before.

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[CannonballHead]

Not necessarily. Microsoft knows that some people (many?) hate Windows and won't use it; releasing quality cross-platform software and technologies can be profitable.

Have you ever seen Microsoft Office on a mac?

Re:What's MSFTs Point?

[CannonballHead]

IMO, the only reason they released it for Windows is because they know most of the world uses Windows. Then, with the iPod, they NEEDED iTunes to be on Windows, or they'd likely only get a small percentage of people buying an iPod. It seemed to work, everyone (except me) has an iPod.

Windows doesn't lock everything on Windows platforms either (e.g., MS Office, Internet Explorer, etc)

Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[JSBiff]

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?

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Drakonik]

I agree with both the security risk assessment and the comment on web-based technologies.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be able to access my GMail from anywhere via the web interface, but I primarily use Thunderbird and IMAP to handle email. Maybe I'm a minority, but I have very very shifty internet access. either my ISP or my router/modem are faulty, but either way, I'm lucky to stay connected for five minutes. What web services always assume that the users will have constant connectivity.

The desktop is a good platform. Sure, throw in the ability to sync to a webserver, but putting a full-featured document editor into a browser into a possibly bloated OS is just too much overhead.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[TeknoHog]

In the great /. tradition, I didn't read the article, but the summary suggest that this is a proof of concept. Running Rails demonstrates that you can implement a full Ruby environment in Silverlight. Anyway, I agree with your point about the ever-extending capabilities of browsers -- I thought Emacs should already have served as a warning.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[zappepcs]

This is the opposite of FUD, or rather something I'd call DUF(f) ... for the English, we understand that. Anyway, when MS is telling you that they are improving, embracing, extending, becomming transparent, supporting OSS, and using someone else's technology to do so... they are hyping up the buzzwords to draw you, get your distracted attention.

It's of little concern that they are not inventing their own version of Ruby, they are only modifying to use it, then you won't have to have OSS as MS will have a .net alternative for that, and throw in SilverLight for more busswordiness, and the marketing droids just juice themselves all over.

We are making .net compatible with Ruby/Rails and giving it SilverLight functionality as well. This should help us keep our name in the spaces that Ruby is now pretty much commanding the buzzword marketshare.

There, does that make sense?

How about this: MS training certs now cover Ruby/Rails (well sort of) so you can put that on your resume too. Of course, you won't know shit about it really, but you'll get the cert through .net training.

Does that make more sense?

Sorry, but yes, I'm cynical when it comes to MS.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[QUILz]

Well, let's just hope Microsoft doesn't allow Silverlight applications to run with the same permissions that ActiveX applets could...

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Trojan35]

"Why can't a web browser just be a web browser?"

Because there's a whole lot of idle CPU cycles out there, and it's a lot faster and cheaper for people to render things on their desktop rather than have your server crunch and send it back through the web.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Sancho]

Because internet-enabled applications are the way of the future, but your average joe-on-the-street thinks that "Internet Explorer is the Internet."

Seriously, for Web Applications which follow the standards, it's a write-once, run-everywhere situation (well, mostly, except for those places where IE mucks things up.) Want to support Windows? It works. Want to support Linux? It works. Want to support Mac? You get the picture. Any platform with a browser which adheres to the standards can "run" your web app. No need to port your application. No need for users to run complicated installers that ask difficult questions.

Of course, the trade-off is in security, as you point out. But hey, the people demand software which is easy to use.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Question 1. I thought Rails was a Server-Side technology for creating dynamic websites?

Yes, and it utilizes scriptaculous and prototype out of the box for client-side programming like DOM Manipulation and Ajax calls.

Question 2. thought SilverLight is a Flash-clone, for implementing client side interfaces and rich media playback?

Well, not really a clone, more like a competitor. It doesn't utilize ActionScript (which is essentially a JavaScript clone) but instead C# or other related MS .Net languages. You can write some rather nifty client side widgets with SilverLight.

Question 3. Is Microsoft talking about a SilverLight-based user-interface which connects to a Rails backend running on the server?

Yes. The same thing can be done with Flash, utilizing things like Ajax calls and JSON or XML parsers.

Question4. Or actually Rails running in the browser?

No, Rails is a server-side technology, a web application framework, similar to J2EE, POJOs + Hibernate/Spring, TurboGears, etc. etc.

Question 5. What benefits would Rails in the browser bring you?

None, because the question is invalid. Rails is a web application framework, and by nature is dealing with server side technology.

Question 6. 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?

Of course, but that's true for any application (i.e. Office Macro Viruses).

Question 7. Why can't a web browser just be a web browser?

Because things evolve and progress demands that web applications be much more interactive than simply static forms and web pages. The world is no longer simply hypertext links. Because rich web applications with interactive interfaces are the logical evolution of the web.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Shados]

I'm not amazingly knowledgeable about Flash' technicality. However, I can say the following about Silverlight: While Silverlight can (in the 2.0 version) be compiled as a kind of CLR-based BLOB that runs in the client, Silverlight can also (and exclusively so in its 1.0 variant) be used as a simple markup, generated from any source. ANY Source.

That is, you can have a PHP page generate a bunch of ECHO statements that make up valid silverlight markup and you're good to go... So that you use PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, whatever... markup is markup. Instead of outputting the markup for an HTML form with HTML input, you output the market for a canvas with whatever controls Silverlight supports... its still just text interprated by the browser, with a little bit of Javascript to inject it in a placeholder (usually a DIV tag). It becomes part of the DOM to some extent, can be manipulated with normal javascript, etc. It is basically just a fancier more integrated DOM extension, than anything else.

To make things short, there's basically no "linking" involved between the two. You just change the format of the string you output, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[DragonWriter]

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?

Yes, specifically, they are referring to a Silverlight-based UI which is presented by and connects back to a Rails backend running on Microsoft's IronRuby on the .NET platform on the server.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[corbettw]

I think I'm missing something, because with a properly designed REST interface that any decent web app programmer can do in their sleep, it shouldn't matter what language or framework you use on the server. The client will pass information back and forth all day, and everyone's happy.

Oh, wait, we're talking about both Microsoft developers AND RoR developers. Nothing decent there at all. Answered my own question, never mind.

(Just kidding, of course.)

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[jgc7]

That is, you can have a PHP page generate a bunch of ECHO statements that make up valid silverlight markup and you're good to go...

By that logic, you could have a PHP emit machine code and avoid a C compiler as well. Silverlight is not markup, it is byte code.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[benwaggoner]

A Silverlight app can be purely XAML (XML markup language) and JScript. That's all Silverlight 1.0 apps are. With Silverlight 2.0 you can use bytecode, but that's not required.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[tepples]

The desktop is a good platform. There's a much larger barrier to entry for a desktop application than for a web application. With a web application, the client software (IE, Firefox) is already deployed, and the more popular rich media plug-ins (Flash Player, Java) have one-click installers. With a desktop application, on the other hand, you have to convince the owner (not necessarily the user) of the computer that the program is worth installing, you may have to get your application into the major GNU/Linux distributions' repositories, and you may have to pay VeriSign $500 per year for a certificate to deploy securely on Windows.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Shados]

Someone stated this already, but Ill repeat it: I was quite specific that Silverlight 2.0 can be bytecode/CLR based, but Silverlight 1.0 is not. Its markup, like HTML, that can be made in notepad, and the browser take it -as is-. So it is quite common practice to take any server language thats good at handling templated text (PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, and I guess Rails) to generate it. Silverlight in its current release is ONLY markup, NOT bytecode, only the beta (or alpha, or whatever it is) of the NEXT version supports byte code.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[RAMMS EIN]

``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''

Yes and no.

In principle, no. As long as the web browser has a set of clearly identified things it can do (e.g. render graphics, perform HTTP requests) and can do nothing else, there can never be a problem. In that case, more languages, libraries, etc. to run in the web browser would make it better; perhaps we could even get some decent model for rich Internet applications that way.

In practice, of course, web browsers are horribly complex monstrosities written in unsafe languages, so one can hardly be sure what the browser can and can't do. In that case, we should be concerned about what new languages, libraries, etc. running in the browser will do to our security. The combination of filesystem access and running untrusted code, which all major browsers provide, is already quite interesting.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Allador]

For what its worth, Silverlight against REST works great.

You lose access to some of the tools that you can use with proper SOAP (xsd.exe to pre-generate strongly typed result sets, LINQ, etc) but it does work quite well. And all nicely asynchronous, with good support in the language.

Mind you, you can tell from the tools that full SOAP is the preferred method, but REST is covered quite nicely.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[nametaken]

Which brings up an interesting point. XAML makes things far more open than Flash does. I need no expensive, closed tools to generate it. I'm also more likely to be able to inspect others work. In my estimation, this is one of the greatest strengths of HTML and CSS. They're transparent.

This is the one way in which it might take real market share from flash.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Richard_at_work]

For a long time Google Calendar worked perfectly in IE and in Firefox, but didn't work in Safari. So no, its not write-once, run-everywhere (apart from IE).

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[gbjbaanb]

XAML makes things far more open than Flash does. really?

are you sure?

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Shados]

they were talking about raw Flash i beleive. Silverlight to CLR what Flex to Flash is, so to speak (not quite).

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Sancho]

Are you so sure that the problem was with Safari and not with Google?

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[Just Some Guy]

Instead of outputting the markup for an HTML form with HTML input, you output the market for a canvas with whatever controls Silverlight supports...

Interesting Freudian slip.

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[prockcore]

For a long time, safari didn't support AJAX. Not until safari 2 (which came out with tiger).

Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . .

[CyberLife]

Because features are what sell in the mass-market. Most consumers don't select products based on their merits.

huh?

[wardk]

is there an actual story here?

when MS USES Ruby and then actually contributes ANYTHING with a license that isn't viral, report back.

Re:huh?

[cbrocious]

The DLR and IronRuby are released under the MS-PL which is OSI-approved. Stop spreading FUD, asshat.

Re:huh?

[wardk]

I am sure it's got the Good Housekeeping Logo too.

check back after the first lawsuit

Re:huh?

[Forbman]

The viral part about it is that the strategic thinking is that through Rails (on IronRuby and IIS), they can get people to embed Windows-based dependencies not only on the server side, but through the client-side as well. The Moonlight implementation will suck just enough that in the fantasy world that Microsoft lives in the rest of the world will just clamor (er, keep their Windows-based client computers around running IE) to upgrade to Vista, IE8, and whatever other shinola comes from Redmond, as will whatever plugin for Firefox that gets released upon the world, except this time it won't be because Adobe just didn't want to dedicate resources to the various non-Windows/non-IE versions.

I don't mind admitting that I'll keep XP running on my main computer (definitely no plans to downgrade to Vista or Windows 7), but run IE on it intentionally for web browsing? Yeah, riiiight...

Re:huh?

[Jor-Al]

Presumably Moonlight will be good enough to be to Linux what the Linux version of Adobe's Flash plug-in is to Linux. Is that supposed to elicit a positive feeling? Adobe's Flash plug-in on Linux is crap.

Re:huh?

[One Childish N00b]

Perhaps you are unaware of what the OSI is, or are confused as to what OSI are doing the approving. The Open Source Initiative was started by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, hardly people likely to risk anything involving viral Microsoft licencing. They're smart guys. Just because the OSI don't have a loudmouth spokesman like the FSF have Stallman doesn't mean they aren't important, relevant and clever enough to ensure they wouldn't fall for MS's legal tricks.

Sun Java.

[Odder]

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.

Re:Sun Java.

[cbrocious]

Microsoft is giving them support and all of the licenses involved have patent release clauses. MS wouldn't have a leg to stand on legally here (not that that's stopped companies with lots of money from burying the competition in legal fees before).

Guys, I got this.

[Hankapobe]

I thought Emacs should already have served as a warning.

Ooooo, aaahh, dude.....um, yeah. Uh, some folks here are a bit sensitive about that....if you know what I mean....

No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log)

[mikelieman]

I went to Silverlight's site:

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 ~]$ ./Silverlight.exe
bash: ./Silverlight.exe: cannot execute binary file
[mike@orion ~]$
[mike@orion ~]$

So, what's MSFT's point again?

Reminds me of the old joke

[goombah99]

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.

Buzzword marketshare?

[RingDev]

This should help us keep our name in the spaces that Ruby is now pretty much commanding the buzzword marketshare. They are targeting your mother's basement?

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

Re:Buzzword marketshare?

[xiaomai]

I disagree. The only place manager's I know get their tech info is from CNET publications like eWeek. Although I don't read eWeek religiously, I'll flip through it occasionally when I'm at work, and I see articles talking about Ruby on Rails frequently.

Ruby stinks anyway

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Shados]

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...)

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[DragonWriter]

Why pick Ruby unless they're just trying to look trendy.

Probably to compete with Sun and JRuby (which isn't, per se, a Sun project, but it is a project Sun is participating in directly.) And dynamic languages (including, but not limited to, Ruby) aren't "trendy" for no reason -- they deliver real value. Sure, there's lots of hype around them, but there is something underneath the hype as well. Anything Java has, especially if it is something Sun is backing directly, Microsoft needs to show that .NET can match. Not, of course, that IronRuby is anywhere close to matching JRuby in any meaningful way.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Jack9]

If people say "we want Ruby", they'll deliver.

I barely hear "Ruby is good" much less a mass of developers saying "we want Ruby".

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Cal Paterson]

It's so disappointing that this is such an obvious troll; because it's so true.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Shados]

I hear it all the time. Mind you, its mostly coming from "Joe Developer I never heard of Model-View-Control and Object Relational Mapping until I heard of Rail", and only rarely (but it happens!) from good, professional, skilled web developer, but these people will use Ruby either way...may as well give em a few more choices.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Allador]

They didnt 'just pick Ruby' (paraphrasing mine).

Look on the right hand side of the page here.

IronPyton, IronRuby, IronLisp, IronScheme, Lua/Nua. There are other non-dynamic ones out there too, like F#.

What MS did was NOT to pick one language to focus on. They built some really nice dynamic language support on top of the .net clr and runtime, that allows all these different non-strongly-typed-languages work well on top of .net.

They DID hire some of the notables from the Ruby and Python camps to run these projects inside MS.

I hear what you're saying, but its really not trend-whoring. The whole DLR is quite an excellent approach to dynamic languages on top of the .net clr runtime. You'll see some similar things from Java in the next few years.

The fact that you see so much about Ruby is just because Ruby is the 'new hotness' at the moment, but this too shall pass.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[setagllib]

You'll see some similar things from Java in the next few years. The JVM is sufficiently advanced that a DLR is not necessary for it. JRuby in particular is already generally faster, by no small margin, than the C Ruby 1.8 it is compatible with. I repeat, the Java version is faster than the C version and delivers compatible functionality. From what I've seen that's far far ahead of any DLR language. The DLR is solving problems Java doesn't have.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[Allador]

Then why is there an entire new dynamic language support infrastructure (ie, JSR292, invokedynamic) being built into Java 7?

My understanding is that JRuby and similar on the JVM use wrappers and conversions (basically a custom translation interface), whereas they are working on a more generically supported approach.

Some quick googling on jsr292 invokedynamic and java7 should give some more info.

A quick google myself shows some good info here.

Jim Hugunin has talked about some of the challenges of dynamic languages on the JVM compared to the DLR, which you can find with some googling.

Re:Ruby stinks anyway

[setagllib]

My point stands - it's one optimisation, not a whole separate project.

Ajax/JavaScript

[JSBiff]

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 .Net framework libraries (which has lots of system-call type objects/methods, e.g. file access, registry modification, program execution, etc). The article (yes, I did read it) made it sound like Microsoft was going to put a full Ruby implementation into SilverLight, and give that Ruby implementation full access to the .Net framework? Am I reading that right? Does SilverLight already give developers using 'traditional' .Net languages full access to the framework? That just seems like a plain bad idea.

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.

Re:Ajax/JavaScript

[Joebert]

In my experience Microsoft stuff in the browser was quite powerfull, it was actually nice being able to work with all of the things you mentioned there & being able to do such things was something I missed as I started getting into doing cross-browser stuff & hearing about security.


In conclusion, we should go back to beating our children.

Re:Ajax/JavaScript

[benwaggoner]

Silverlight runs in a sandbox, and sits on top of a platform abstraction layer; it doesn't provide direcct access to any native code APIs that would cause a concern like you describe.

For example, when in full screen mode there isn't full keyboard support, so there's no way to spoof a login dialog to grab a password.

Also, it's not the full .NET framework. It's mainly a portable subset, although it has some features beyond .NET 3.5, like the Media Element.

Re:Ajax/JavaScript

[Allador]

As other's below have said, you dont have the full .NET framework in silverlight, only a subset.

In addition, all .NET apps run in one of various security models (partial trust, full trust, etc). As an example, only certain types of apps can be run on a shared MS windows asp.net server, because you dont want to give them full control to the OS.

Another one is 'click once deployments' where an entire .NET app gets deployed from a UNC or webserver, and runs in a low trust model, in a sandbox, with almost no privs to the local system.

MS has actually had an excellent security record with their .NET security model, with respect to successful breaks of it.

Microsoft has lost control of the web

[Vexorian]

Help them recover it, use silverlight.

Re:Microsoft has lost control of the web

[ady1]

I would if only I could find a single website which actually uses it. Reminds of that thing called zune which was suppose to help me get social.

Re:Microsoft has lost control of the web

[h4nk]

Help them recover it, use silverlight. hahaha. No. Flex/Flash is a much stronger implementation of this technology and it is already platform independent. With an Eclipse-based IDE, Open source media and remote data servers and AMF, why bother with silverlight? Frankly, as a web developer, I have enough headaches with Microsoft's loose implementations and platform lock-in. They did this to themselves and they've been left in the cold. I really don't care if they freeze their butts off.

Re:Microsoft has lost control of the web

[Allador]

Thats because its too new at the moment.

They did a quick release of Silverlight 1, which was pure XAML markup and javascript. Very light, very simple, and you could only do media-style apps on it really.

Silverlight 2 is in beta now, and is quite impressive technically, but very very young yet. XAML is quite nice, and being able to use C# or any DLR language in your silverlight code (as opposed to actionscript in flex/flash) is very very nice.

However, its very young, and wont have some traction for a while.

Flex/Flash isnt quite as sexy (technically) but has the advantage of alot more maturity, and less vendor dependency.

Re:Microsoft has lost control of the web

[Allador]

I agree, though for a little bit different reason.

Flex/Flash IS a much strong platform now, plus all of it except the Flash player is open-source (blazeds, amf, swf format, flex sdk, etc).

However, give a few years, and Silverlight/DLR/XAML will be quite the hot thing, technically. You'll always be strapped to MS using it, but aside from that, the underlying technology design is superior, IMO. Silverlight and the DLR are just way too young at this point.

But look at some of the comparisons:

Silverlight: XAML, Flex: MXML

MXML has quite a legacy background in movie/animation flash. It's evolved from there to a more typical event driven application. XAML was developed from the ground up for this and you can see it in how easy some things are to do in it. But XAML is also way young, and missing some things that just arent implemented in this version.

Silverlight: C#, any DLR language, Flex: ActionScript 3

Good lord, not even a comparison here. Just about any modern language is better than javascript/actionscript. Mind you, AS3 is a big leap over AS2 and previous. But still. It's javascript at the core, which is never good.

All that being said, we're opting for Flex on the front end and java/spring/hibernate on the back end. Mostly though because Flex is ready now, and platform independence and not being tied to MS is important to us.

Re:Microsoft has lost control of the web

[h4nk]

Good lord, not even a comparison here. Just about any modern language is better than javascript/actionscript. Mind you, AS3 is a big leap over AS2 and previous. But still. It's javascript at the core, which is never good. That's not true. Javascript and Actionscript are derived from ECMA script. And even with that common ancestry, they are fundamentally different. Biggest difference being that AS is fully OO, and JS is not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

Penny-Arcade

[GradiusCVK]

Kinda reminds me of this comic.

Re:Nice ASCII art...

[hostyle]

and wearing a miners helmet (for obvious reasons)

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[vux984]

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.

There's one difference

[mangu]

Embrace, extend,.... now wait for it.

MS' ass is still bleeding from the reaming over Java.

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?

Re:There's one difference

[Zarf]

Embrace, extend,.... now wait for it.

MS' ass is still bleeding from the reaming over Java.

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? EFF?

warning or slashvertisement?

[Xtifr]

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.

Re:warning or slashvertisement?

[chromatic]

Looks to me more like a slashvertisement.

Are you seriously suggesting that someone paid Slashdot to link to a Computerworld article to promote Silverlight? IronRuby? Computerworld?

May I recommend you put down Dan Brown and pick up Focault's Pendulum? The conspiracy theories there are immeasurably better.

Re:warning or slashvertisement?

[Allador]

Plus, both require a huge, ugly back end to be installed. No they dont. You can serve silverlight from a vanilla apache box, with no mono installed on the back end.

The silverlight plugin is also quite small (a couple of megs).

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[rts008]

"So, what's MSFT's point again?"

Swallow you whole into MS's Monoculture.

Wrong.

[recoiledsnake]

Embrace, extend,.... now wait for it.

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.

Re:Wrong.

[chrish]

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.

Re:Wrong.

[Ilgaz]

I have tried Java 6 on MS Virtual PC 7 running XP SP3, running on emulation, on my quad G5.

I bet people already call me crazy for it. Guess what? I went to dslreports.com , used their RWIN testing/fixing tool (Java applet!) and it was almost responsive as OS X Java 5.

If you tried benchmarking Sun Java between current Solaris and Windows Server 2003, the result may surprise you.

Re:Wrong.

[ahabswhale]

...if it was once horrible, the new version can only be barely usable Yes, it's so barely usable that thousands of businesses stake their existence on it.

Java is relegated to the backend of servers, calculating business logic and serving web apps, though .NET seems to be overtaking Java there too Really? Provide proof. I've been doing Java development for many years and there's no shortage of gigs I can get. There's TONS of Java jobs. In fact, there's a shortage of people.

When did Microsoft ever "control the Web"?

[PCM2]

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.

Re:When did Microsoft ever "control the Web"?

[Vexorian]

I do think flash gives adobe too much control of the web.

However, PDF being an ISO standard (though that got easy to achieve recently) And getting multiple implementations that run in multiple platforms, does not look like that much of an issue, nevertheless I would prefer people just tried to keep good standard usage on their pages, the whole flash, silverlight stuff might be awesome for games, but you get to see some pages that were supposed to be informative yet are filled with flash. Silverlight is not an exception with Microsoft getting so many deals with things like hospitals to get silverlight attached to them, kind of lame...

Looks like these guys are trying to make web developers 10 years of efforts to make the web portable and accessible.

Re:When did Microsoft ever "control the Web"?

[Forbman]

I do think flash gives adobe too much control of the web.

Why? Until the day comes when the only way to implement websites is through Flash, then yes. But since most of the web doesn't use it at all or as a secondary feature, well...

Re:I don't think so.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yeah, Java bent over for MS's IronPython!

Not quite

[CustomDesigned]

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.

Re:Not quite

[TheNetAvenger]

Technically, correct...

However, MS was one of the biggest JAVA proponents, even integrating the VM in their OS as soon as possible. So what did Sun gain in fighting over a 'technical' issue with the Windows VM version?

MS had no intention of 'polluting' JAVA, as they were not distributing JAVA for anything but Windows. As for the .core changes, it is worth noting that MS was trying to make JAVA even more of a contender as a real Windows Solution.

Sun got butt hurt over several other things, and used the 'technical' arguments to halt MS, and in the end got what they deserved. As other OSes, even OS X took the same license and liberties with JAVA, even modifying .core portions of JAVA for OS optimizations. Microsoft is the only company that got sued though.

At the time Sun was pissed that Microsoft's push forward with JAVA was ahead of what Sun was doing with JAVA. Sun also wanted to pull back MS to maintain the OS distribution binaries for JAVA, and eliminate the MS VM.

The fact that the MS VM was the first to have runtime optimizations that allowed the MS VM to run over 10x faster than the Sun VM didn't help matters, as it gave the Sun JAVA team a bit of egg on their face. Even to this day, the MS VM still out benchmarks the Sun VM binaries, which is horribly sad.

In a recent internal study our company produced, it was found that less than 10% of Windows installations included any form of JAVA VM, and almost 1/2 of these were still running the MS VM. .NET 3.0 has a larger install base in the Windows world than JAVA, and this is not even including Vista, where it is installed by default (And that is 100 million installations in addition)

Real development teams hardly pays attention to JAVA unless they have a specific cross platform need that JAVA is the quick and dirty solution. .NET took the place of JAVA development for Windows applications, and even as Mono moves forward, many Linux developers are already considering .NET as a viable platform. This will explode as the .NET 3.0 features get outside of the Vista world with 3.5, since not only do you get what Sun promised 11 years ago, but features that are not currently part of any other development paradigm.

Sun screwed themselves, plain and simple, and JAVA still hasn't met the expectations or promises given to the IT community from the mid 90s. We are still waiting on a VM that works consistency across plaforms, has inherent managed security, and can perform faster than a snail in a pile of salt.

So you are correct about the technical/legal angle Sun used to sue Microsoft, but the reasons behind it is something you are not explaining, nor the ramifications of what Sun did, and even internally admits was the worst corporate decision affecting JAVA they ever made.

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.

This was NOT a result of the MS suit, but a track Sun was already starting before they tried to reel MS in initially. They wanted full control, and also wanted the optimization code MS wrote for the MS VM, when MS went WTF, Sun sued them. PERIOD. (Notice other companies 'polluting' the core with the same license MS had didn't get sued, as they had little Sun wanted back.)

Re:Not quite

[TheNetAvenger]

Geesh, the Sun developers are still so bitter... (And apparently horny)

Re:Not quite

[CustomDesigned]

Technically, correct...

However, MS was one of the biggest JAVA proponents, even integrating the VM in their OS as soon as possible. So what did Sun gain in fighting over a 'technical' issue with the Windows VM version? It gained a Java standard that continued to be write-once run anywhere (modulo platform bugs). Windows specific extensions are fine, and welcome, in a cross platform standard - provided they are *not* in the core libraries. Sun's mistake, like so many others, was trusting Microsoft. .NET is not and never will be cross platform (no, mono doesn't cut it, and if it ever does, MS will kill it). It will likely help Microsoft support different CPUs (running Windows), however.

There are other cross-platform approaches with different advantages and drawbacks (like QT). But I am glad that Java has remained a contender.

Re:Not quite

[civilizedINTENSITY]

This probably says more about your customers than anything else:

Java Desktop
Over 91% of Internet-connected PCs have Java enabled (Source: Omniture, April 2007).
This includes over 63% of Sun JRE in the US, and over 65% of Sun JRE in Italy/Spain/UK (Nielsen//NetRatings, January 2007)

92% (and growing) of JRE installs (Java.com, J.S.C.) are now Java SE 6 (April 2007, Sun)

Estimated Worldwide Java SE penetration per Operating System and VM vendor (Source: Sun estimate, April 2007)

* Sun JRE (Windows): 65%
* Microsoft VM (Windows): 21%
* Apple VM (Mac OS): 3.5%
* Other (including Java SE on Linux and other OS: 1.5%
PC OEMS representing over 60% of all shipped PCs in Q4 2006 have signed Java SE redistribution agreements with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

9 of the top 10 PC OEM vendors have a JRE redistribution agreement with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

http://www.canoo.com/blog/index.php?s=jre

Other interesting facts:

6 Million Java Developers Worldwide

By the end of CY 2007, About 85% of all mobile devices shipping will have Java technology in them (Ovum, May 2007)

800 Million Total Java Desktops

7 Million Total Java enabled set-top boxes

4 Million Total Java-enabled Blu Ray devices

436,000,000 JRE downloads br>
8,750,000 Total Java SDK downloads -(SE, EE, ME)

6,300,000 Java SE JDK downloads

720,000 Java SE JDK downloads/month

Re:Not quite

[TheNetAvenger]

This probably says more about your customers than anything else:

Ya, our little customers like EDS, GM, NASA, Lockheed, etc...

6 Million Java Developers Worldwide

These are Sun numbers based on downloads. Guess the % of active developers?

4 Million Total Java-enabled Blu Ray devices

Um, are you talking about BD-J by chance? This is a UI/Multimedia subset for Disc Menus and Content, not JAVA or a JAVA platform rather an adaptation. (Something Sun would have sued over just a few years ago.)

800 Million Total Java Desktops

7 Million Total Java enabled set-top boxes

4 Million Total Java-enabled Blu Ray devices

436,000,000 JRE downloads br>
8,750,000 Total Java SDK downloads -(SE, EE, ME)

6,300,000 Java SE JDK downloads

720,000 Java SE JDK downloads/month

Ripped right from a Sun marketing Blog none the less, sweet. If we are using this as facts, then I could say Windows is the world's greatest OS, Linux is doomed, and OS X is a fad for people that don't understand computers. (I'll let you find the blogs that support all these insane claims as well.)

Wow, I would bet my programming future on the number of people that downloaded the JDK. Go look at VS and VS trial downloads from this last year alone and it makes the 6 Million JAVA developers look foolish to even try to purport as something 'impressive'. (Hell even be credible and compare it to the number of MSDN subscribers that PAY MONEY for full platform releases and development tools.)


By the end of CY 2007, About 85% of all mobile devices shipping will have Java technology in them (Ovum, May 2007)

Wow again. The name numbers are expected for Flash and even Silverlight. (Of course Silverlight is only a year old, how many years of optimizing has it taken to get a stable or competent JAVA VM?)

Let alone if you are looking to the future of development JAVA is dated, buggy, slow, BIG, and doesn't even start to touch new graphical programming constructs the world is moving to. (Hence the push for Flash and Silverlight on mobile devices.)

JAVA had a chance, that chance is fading fast. The graphical changes in just the last year alone have left dust on JAVA for many developers.

If you compare it to things like .NET w/WPF or even freaking Flash JAVA is slow and doesn't have a stable graphical core that can even compete to either.

It is like this:
JAVA - cool you can make Duke Nukem type games for phones.

MS .NET - used to write parts of DirectX9.0c, an equally freaking managed language, but with performance JAVA couldn't dream of having.

MS .NET 3.x - WPF that can handle 2D graphics that PDFs and Illustrator itself can't understand in complexity, let alone provides a UI managed layer to DirectX.

SilverLight - WPF Light so to speak, that in 2.0 is hardware accelerated, runs on a .NET VM core, and runs circles around JAVA in performance, let alone features.

Real application development? Well you move to a real language like C or even freaking C# if you want to stay managed and in .NET.

As for .NET outside of Windows, look at Silverlight and then take a serious look at Mono if you think it is going anywhere. The Linux users using Mono as a crossplatform development solution is probably bigger than 6 Million downloads even. Geesh

And I could go on and on with freaking real world examples that a lot of people still haven't figured out, or haven't looked outside their basement window in the last couple of years to even understand. Do yourself a favor, do some Google searches on people that JAVA fell short and have already moved on.

Besides, quoting numbers is a bit silly. There are 1 Billion Windows installation, should we all just throw away our other OSes?

This is like the MASSIVE headlines about 1 million Mac users Switching to Windows in a Year

Re:Not quite

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"ya"..."um"..."Geesh"..."Wow"

You have obviously drank the kool-aid. Good luck with that. Try to avoid going over the top so much, though.

Re:Not quite

[TheNetAvenger]

You have obviously drank the kool-aid. Good luck with that. Try to avoid going over the top so much, though.

Not blindly loving and supporting JAVA is drinking kool-aid?

Have another cup, they say the second dose makes JAVA even more cool.
*hands civilizedINTENSITY another glass of Java laced Kool-Aid*

Geesh...

Something .NET did right

[CustomDesigned]

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.

Re:Something .NET did right

[Dragonshed]

.NET always had good support, since it was architected as a common language runtime (CLR). The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better.

It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages, including a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code.

Hey!

[flacco]

Hey, Microsoft - look at us not caring!

hooray!

[Reality Master 201]

So, they'll do the open source world a favor and extinguish RoR?

I'll by six copies of Vista for that.

Re:hooray!

[RockDoctor]

So, they'll do the open source world a favor and extinguish RoR?

I'll by six copies of Vista for that.

So, what would it take to make you actually USE those six copies that you'd "by"?

I ask purely in the spirit of unpleasant prurience, like wanting to see of that baseball bat really will fit in sideways. Splinters and all. Dry.

Re:hooray!

[Reality Master 201]

Buy, not by. Sigh. Drinking and typing is bad.

Where's the twitter patrol??

[Anonymous Coward]

The twitter patrol must be on break. I'll take over I guess...

Shut up twitter, ya twat. And your little sockpuppets too.

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[Gavagai80]

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.

Wine?

[tepples]

bash: ./Silverlight.exe: cannot execute binary file Apparently, you don't have PE files associated to Wine.

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[oloron]

its cross platform, as long as those platforms are win32/64 and worse

"IronRuby doesn't just let you run Rails; it lets you interact with the rich set of libraries provided by .Net," Lam said. "You'll be able to use IronRuby to build server-based applications that run on top of ASP.Net or ASP.Net MVC. You'll be able to use IronRuby to build client applications that run on top of [Windows Presentation Foundation] or Silverlight." How about using the language as it was intended, instead of adding these features which are currently only supported natively on a windows box, and this is nothing more than the usual microsoft schtick, no mention of what kind of hacks are going to be required to get anything developed using IronRuby working on a linux or mac. most likely a complete re-write with the coder thinking 'wtf were they thinking'

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[vux984]

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.

RoR in IIS

[Nicolay77]

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.

Fearful

[nodan]

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 ...

So... what you're saying is...

[Valdrax]

We're going off the Rails on a crazy train?

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[Almahtar]

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. 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). That means porting it to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy because the code is guaranteed to be accessible by license.

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.

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[vux984]

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.

Until we have a full OSS RIA Client VM ...

[Qbertino]

... 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.

Re:Bad Article, Bad Summary

[setagllib]

What I don't get is, what happened to RubyCLR? This IronRuby has the same name as an old IronRuby. Microsoft hired RubyCLR developers and now is developing yet another IronRuby instead? Are they seriously starting over just to get it under a different license?!

MS same old tricks

[necro2607]

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..

Nothing to see here

[Keeper Of Keys]

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.

Ruby on dot.NET ..

[rs232]

What are the legal implications of running Ruby on dot.NET and why would you want to do such a thing?

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[nstlgc]

I'd pay money to see a logfile of you executing javac.exe on Linux.

Skynet

[DrYak]

followed shortly thereafter by the Slashdot webserver achieving sentience So, James Cameron almost got it almost right.
except that, instead of launching a nuclear war, the real Skynetdot's first reaction would be :
"- Lol, I haz a beowulf cluster !!11!oneone"

Re:That may be more

[benwaggoner]

Because Silverlight is self contained, and has no way to call external native code. It has no idea what if any version of .NET is installed. Same with codecs; those are all baked into the runtime, with no dependency on the native codecs available on the system.

Re:Patented media algorithms

[benwaggoner]

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. Because lots of companies that aren't big CE vendors have a lot of very useful IP for codecs. Plus the CE vendors are perfectly happy to continue to get patent licensing revenue. As the DVD market has moved to about 95% "made in China" the patent licensing has provided substantial ongoing revenue for the companies who originally created the DVD market, but have since been priced out of it. Blu-ray can be very much viewed as an attempt to both reset the patent clock on high-volume CE to keep that revenue going as the MPEG-2 and DVD patents expire, and to provide something with a high barrier to entry for the Chinese companies to manufacture. Of course, the latter means prices stay high, so while it might help the big Japanese electronics companies, it isn't doing anything for Hollywood.

Anyway, that's another rant :).

To flip it around another way, yes, the CE vendors could have built a royalty free codec in partnership. But that would be a big expensive effort, and excluding patents from companies who would insist on being paid would make for a weaker codec. The codec licensing fees are pretty reasonable, and it made more financial sense to work with the big standardized codecs of MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1.

Re:How do they learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, while we're wishing, how about some more items for your list?

• Steve Ballmer's head on a pike
• Bill Gates' first born
• Imprisonment for any Vista user who has stated in public that it works for them, since it is clearly libelous to Linux True Believers
• A signed confession from everybody who has ever disagreed with you, admitting that they were part of a grand Microsoft-funded conspiracy to single out an inconsequential Slashdot poster for public humiliation
• A pony

Have I missed anything?

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[Almahtar]

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?

Re:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log

[vux984]

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.

Silverfish

[mov__ax]

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?