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Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails
CWmike writes "Friday Microsoft will demonstrate integration between its new Silverlight browser plug-in and Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's John Lam, a program manager in the dynamic language runtime team, said in a recent blog item: 'Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn't a more real Ruby program than Rails.' Also at the event, Microsoft officials will demonstrate IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application."
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"?
Um... Actually it is:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
Microsoft is assisting in Moonlight's development:
http://lwn.net/Articles/248198/
Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother?
What are you talking about? It runs on all modern versions of Windows.
Stick Men
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...
...exaggerate?
quote from the mono project FAQ (http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General): "The Mono API today is somewhere in between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0, see our Roadmap for details about what is implemented."
.Net framework is 3.5.
.NET on anything else than Windows. Let's get real and see that the Mono or Moonlight projects are just PR... thanks.
while looking at the MS website it seems that the latest
frankly at this point I would seriously doubt that MS (or Novell, for that matter) has any serious intention of implementing
anybody needs my tinfoil hat?
I had another sig before, but this one is better
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.
.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
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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?
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.
Boss: were have a problem. how do we get a persistence API for our silverlight environment?
Young turk: I know! we could tie the rail and silverlight APIs
Crusty the Unix programmer: yes you could, but then you'd have two problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Question 1. I thought Rails was a Server-Side technology for creating dynamic websites?
.Net languages. You can write some rather nifty client side widgets with SilverLight.
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
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.
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
.NET 3.0 and 3.5 were language extensions on top of 2.0. They still execute ontop of the same CLR.
.NET 1.1, and they're now targetting full feature compliance against .NET 2.0.
.NET 3.5 apps won't run. It just means certain bits (such as LINQ, WPF, WCF, Anonymous Types, etc) are either not present or not completely implemented yet.
.NET / Mono codebases. Yes, they have shared code, however since Silverlight 2.0 is a vastly cut down version of the .NET Framework.
Effectively,
If memory serves, Mono has recently announced full feature compliance against
That doesn't mean
In either case, Silverlight/Moonlight are seperate from the
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.
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.
If history has taught us anything, it's that people are just not going to ask themselves pointless questions like that.
You don't get a choice. You have to deal with whatever comes down, and what comes down will have pretty much all been created on Windows systems. The key thing to remember hear is that people are not writing content for Moonlight. They are writing it for Silverlight. If it stops working on Moonlight they're simply not going to care when it boils down to it.
Really? These are well worked standard tactics from the past twenty-five years. Do they really need to keep being explained?
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.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Only thing is, it wasn't Java the language, it was Sun the corporation behind Java that sued Microsoft. Now tell me, which is the big corporation behind Ruby with deep enough pockets to face Microsoft at the courts?
Having a large share of the browser market doesn't necessarily mean you control it -- not when the majority of Web companies are unwilling to give up the other segment of their potential audience. If you'd said that Microsoft controls the intranet, I could maybe believe that... but between PDF and Flash, you could argue that Adobe controls more of the Web than Microsoft does.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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.
... I won't trust anybody with Rich Client technologies further than I can throw them. Be it Adobe, Curl, Wild Tangent, or - heavens forbid - Microsoft. Take that from an experienced Flash Application Developer. For years and years now Adobe has been keeping Linux on a short leash. Allways coming up late, now, once again, limiting proposed hardware acceleration and certain functions to certain host OSes, ect.
I like Flash and it's a remarkable asset. But I've never fully trusted these guys and my trust in them isn't growing.
Yet it looks as though after 10 years Sun is finally getting serious at attempting move towards RIA territory. If JavaFX is halfway decent, it could actually become the new king of all things RIA we've all been waiting for. If the core components of it are open source and the reference implementations aswell, then we're all set for a bright new future of RIAs.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca