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The Linux distillery Moonlighting Linux: the future of rich web apps
The Linux distillery Moonlighting Linux: the future of rich web apps | Moonlighting Linux: the future of rich web apps |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 08 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 4 Silverlight, like Flash above, requires a browser plug-in. The Silverlight program code pseudo-compiles and the resultant code is executed within the plug-in. Microsoft have developed Silverlight plug-ins for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.Featured Whitepaper
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Now, Silverlight builds on the dot Net framework so you might be excused for thinking it is a Windows only technology. Yet, Microsoft have provided a Silverlight plug-in for Safari running on MacOS – but that’s it for the non-Windows camp? Why no Linux plug-in? Go figure. Not to worry; those brilliant coders at the Mono Project have come up with the goods again, taking on themselves to produce a Mono-based implementation of Silverlight which they are calling Moonlight. Let’s rewind a bit and cover some of the terms: firstly, dot Net is Microsoft’s newest application development framework. Rather than compile programs right to pure machine code, they compile to an intermediate language which runs on a framework – “the dot Net framework” – which provides a large collection of utility routines, data structures and many other helpful items. The latest version of the framework provides a graphics module called WPF, or the Windows Presentation Framework. To run a dot Net app you need the dot Net framework which is about a 50Mb download. Obviously, that would be an absurd plug-in for a web browser. That’s where Silverlight comes in. It is much more limited but packs core functionality into a 4Mb runtime. It won’t do 3D, it has limited databinding and limited access to the system but for the most part it works. The Silverlight plug-ins are free; anybody – well, any Windows or MacOS person – is able to run Silverlight apps without problem. Developers will need the Silverlight software development kit (SDK) but this is free. However, it only works with Visual Studio 2008. Here’s where Moonlight comes in for the Linux world. Building on the Mono Project’s Linux implementation of the dot Net framework, Moonlight aims to provide both a Linux SDK to build Silverlight apps and a stand-alone Silverlight runtime. You can download the latest version of Moonlight but note it presently only supports Firefox 2, although Firefox 3 support is coming in. The easiest thing to do is download the prebuilt plug-in, but being open source if you are keen you can download the source code and build it from scratch yourself. You will need to do this to get the Silverlight SDK and to have support for popular codecs. However you do it, get Moonlight up and running on your system. Next check out http://silverlight.net/Showcase for a gallery of Silverlight applications available online already. That’s well and good, but let’s make our own. CONTINUED |
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