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."
"Version of xxx" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Version of xxx" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Version of xxx" (Score:5, Insightful)
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" (Score:5, Funny)
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.
So... what you're saying is... (Score:2)
Reminds me of the old joke (Score:5, Funny)
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.
hooray! (Score:2, Funny)
I'll by six copies of Vista for that.
There's one difference (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
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 cl
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.
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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 app
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You can't really blame that on MS.
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...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.
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"Learn How to Become" More Transparent? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Just not on Balmer. OH GOD MY EYES!!!
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The Microsoft Way. You gotta love the guys.
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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.
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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 silverligh
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What's MSFTs Point? (Score:2, Funny)
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, Interesting)
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Informative)
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:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
.NET 2.0SP1, which includes some changes and enhancements to the BCL, such as System.DateTimeOffset.
It's also worth mentioning
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.
.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.
That doesn't mean
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.
.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...)
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 [albahari.com] 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
See http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/Chapter1/Versions.aspx [csharpindepth.com] 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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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 in
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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
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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.
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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 ;-).
I'm not entirely sure you got the right end of the stick
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No, it isn't cross platform. Just tested (w/log) (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/ [microsoft.com]
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 ~]$
bash:
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
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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 lo
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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 t
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Swallow you whole into MS's Monoculture.
Wine? (Score:2)
Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 s
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Re:What's MSFTs Point? (Score:5, Funny)
Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother?
What are you talking about? It runs on all modern versions of Windows.
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http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=571487&cid=23631965 [slashdot.org]
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...
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Rails. . . In the Browser? I'm confused. . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, slightly off-topic, but
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Guys, I got this. (Score:2)
Ooooo, aaahh, dude.....um, yeah. Uh, some folks here are a bit sensitive about that....if you know what I mean....
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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
Buzzword marketshare? (Score:2)
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
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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.
Ajax/JavaScript (Score:3, Interesting)
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 j
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In conclusion, we should go back to beating our children.
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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
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In addition, all
Another one is 'click once deployments' where an entire
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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
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: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.
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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.
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This is the one way in which it might take real market share from flash.
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Yes, specifically, they are referring to a Silverlight-based UI which is presented by and connects back to a Rails backend r
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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.)
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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.
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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
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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,
Ruby stinks anyway (Score:2)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
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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 ma
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Look on the right hand side of the page here [codeplex.com].
IronPyton, IronRuby, IronLisp, IronScheme, Lua/Nua. There are other non-dynamic ones out there too, like F# [wikipedia.org].
What MS did was NOT to pick one language to focus on. They built some really nice dynamic language support on top of the
They DID hire some of the notables from the Ruby and Python camps to run these p
Microsoft has lost control of the web (Score:4, Insightful)
When did Microsoft ever "control the Web"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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...
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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.
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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: XAM
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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
warning or slashvertisement? (Score:2)
*Yes, I know about moonlight, but this clearly says silverlight, and the two have not yet been
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The silverlight plugin is also quite small (a couple of megs).
Hey! (Score:2)
RoR in IIS (Score:2)
Specially after installing Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter crashed my server, so I had to remove it.
Until we have a full OSS RIA Client VM ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [javafx.com] 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.
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Something .NET did right (Score:2)
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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.