Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails 232
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."
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight [mono-project.com]
Microsoft is assisting in Moonlight's development:
http://lwn.net/Articles/248198/ [lwn.net]
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . . (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . . (Score:5, Informative)
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:No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/silverlight.html [apple.com]
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/ [go-mono.com]
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.
Wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
MS' ass is still bleeding from the reaming over 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.
Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
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:Microsoft has lost control of the web (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do they learn? (Score:1, Informative)
Hey, while we're wishing, how about some more items for your list?
Have I missed anything?