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Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight
mikejuk writes "The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight, isn't worth the effort any more. He said, 'Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought [it] would have to become. And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming. These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.'"
It just took a LOT of wasted time for him to believe it.
Silverlight really is a well thought out technology. It does a great job of abstracting the presentation layer from the code, and is pleasant to program. The tools for developing in Silverlight are nice, too. Too bad that it is showing signs of fading away - I think it had a lot of potential.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
It isn't terribly surprising that Mono is abandoning Silverlight, since Microsoft seems to be doing much the same in favor of HTML 5.
The .NET Framework and tools in totality are a different story, though.
By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful."
If only someone could have warned you, oh wait someone did, _everyone_ in the world who has paid any attention to Microsoft's behavior over the last 20 years.
Miguel has supported:
the Microsoft "partnership" with Novell (disaster for Novell in the community)
OOXML/docx (deliberately obfuscated format mess)
C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)
Moonlight/Silverlight (a patent-encumbered flash clone, in an era when flash is going away, now shown to be a bad idea)
I used to wonder if Miguel was a Microsoft plant, now I wonder if he just has a learning disability.
You don't have to implement Silverlight, just the audio/video codecs and one of several possible transports. Silverlight builds on the pre-existing Microsoft Media infrastructure. For example, in many cases I can transcode a Silverlight audio stream by connecting to the legacy RTSP transport and decoding the Windows Media Audio packets. Neither FFmpeg nor GStreamer can do this, because while they have good codec support they have shit transport support.
I've build a custom HTTP/RTSP library and ASF decoder, and then heavily refactored the WMA decoder from FFmpeg. In fact, I've written a daemon which can transcode Windows Media Audio and Flash FLV/FLA audio (plus the easy ones, like Shoutcast and vanilla RTSP), and transcode in real-time for whatever the connecting device requires (various HTTP streaming formats, RTSP, etc; and from, e.g. WMA to Vorbis).
The daemon is both event oriented and multi-process. I can transcode (with resampling) 4 live broadcasts and reflect to 50+ clients while using a fraction of the CPU a browser takes just to playback one stream. Again, FFmpeg, GStreamer, and VLC have all the wrong optimizations for this kind of scaling. Internet media streaming is still in the dark ages.
That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...