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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."
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?
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.
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.
.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?
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.