Silverlight
From WhyNotWiki
Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/30/silverlight-the-web-just-got-richer/).
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When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web - in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.
[edit] The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.
The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB - which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.
Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.
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Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to Flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft [has] a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident - so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.
My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft [has] done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched - but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications [...].
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Paul Krill (May 21, 2007). InfoWorld: Rails creator doubts Silverlight can win converts (http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/05/21/hansson-qa_1.html).
InfoWorld: What do you think of Sun Microsystems' recently announced JavaFX Script for content creation? Is the world ready for yet another scripting language?Hansson: I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.
InfoWorld: I think Sun is saying JavaFX is open source. I'm not sure if JavaFX Script is focused exclusively on Web development. I think it's just one function that can be done with it, and I'm not even sure if it does it that well at this point.
Hansson: That might be true, and I think that HTML and CSS [are] focused on Web development. And I think that there are misconceptions going on from people who are pushing these alternative delivery platforms that somehow Web developers are hungry for richer and richer experiences, that they're really unhappy working with HTML and CSS. And that's just not true. We're not clamoring to re-create the desktop on the Web.
InfoWorld: We don't need a new mousetrap?
Hansson: No, we don't. HTML and CSS is actually a wonderful development environment, and a good number of computer scientists or people who have been around for a long time might consider them hacks or dirty or whatever, but they work.
InfoWorld: But you do use those on Ruby on Rails?
Hansson: Totally. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the key components of how you get Rails applications to a user. And I don't see that changing.
InfoWorld: But not Ruby?
Hansson: Ruby generates those things, so HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are delivery mechanisms.
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InfoWorld: What do you think of .Net and Windows development and Microsoft enabling its Common Language Runtime to run on the Macintosh platform?
Hansson: In some ways I don't really care. I don't follow it very closely. The Microsoft ecosystem is not that interesting to me. It's a very different world from the world that I inhabit, which is one of open standards, open source, and so on and so forth. It's not to say that they don't do interesting stuff. I definitely do think that they have some interesting thoughts, [such as] LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is very interesting. There's definitely a good number of things that the open-source world could learn from some of those initiatives, but wholesale jumping into the Microsoft boat has just never appealed to the kind of work I do.
InfoWorld: Can Microsoft succeed with Silverlight, or are AJAX and Flash the major players for rich Internet application development as it relates to multimedia?
Hansson: I think Microsoft can succeed selling Silverlight to people who already use Microsoft. If you're already using ASP.Net and other Microsoft techniques, that really in lot of ways were trying just to re-create the desktop online, then I totally think that these people will jump all over Silverlight. I do not think that people currently working in open source and with open standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are going to fall off their chairs in pursuit of adopting Silverlight.
InfoWorld: Why not?
Hansson: I think that we don't need that additional complexity, we don't need that "richer experience." It's being sold as it's just universally something better than what we have with HTML and CSS and JavaScript. And I think a lot of the success of the Web has been in the constraints that those standards gave us. A lot of the success of the Web came with the standardization of just having a few tools that you really have to be clever about how to use in an effective way. You didn't have all the opportunities of the world, so you could create one crazy use interface after another. And I think that's often what "rich" means. It means wild or out there or fun. And that's totally fine -- if you're creating a game, then something like Flash is awesome. If you're creating yet another information application, which is the bulk of applications out there, then I think HMTL, CSS, and JavaScript [do] just fine.
InfoWorld: Microsoft is adding support for IronRuby and IronPython to the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). What's your take on that?
Hansson: I enjoy the fact that more people can get to experience Ruby by getting it in the side door somehow, that Ruby can be used in shops [that are] predominantly Microsoft shops. But I hope that those are more planting seeds for people to then get out. I'm not seeing that Ruby on the DLR or whatever is going to convince a lot of people currently using Ruby to jump in the arms of Microsoft. But I do see it the other way around. I do see people who were traditionally using Microsoft technologies being exposed to languages like Python and Ruby and then realizing that hey, maybe I actually don't need the Microsoft part.
