Silverlight + Ruby for .NET? Awesome.
As part of the big hullabaloo around Mix ‘07, Microsoft announced their new Silverlight product, which is basically a less cracked-out Flash, which lets you use .NET languages (including IronPython) to create Flash-like animations and games. Finally, people can design awesome UIs and use a programming language that isn’t evil.
But more importantly, MS created a compiler for Ruby that compiles to MSIL called IronRuby. This means I can use Ruby at work and actually have other people use it. It also means that I might even learn this Silverlight thing if I can create awesome UIs in Ruby, and have it be cross-platform (even though “cross-platform” apparently doesn’t include Linux, don’t worry; Miguel’s gonna have that shit covered post-haste).
Buying into the hype again? Maybe you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade. This is not worth a blog entry!
Here’s a sampling of headlines from the past few years:
“Will Microsoft XAML be the Flash killer?”
“Will Sparkle be the Flash killer?”
“Will WPF/E be the Flash killer?”
“Will Silverlight be the Flash killer?”
We should start asking the real question:
“When will Microsoft give it up?”
BTW. there is *nothing* new under the hood. WIndows Media Video, JavaScript, and XAML are old-school. Have you tried it on FireFox? Have you seen the application sizes? How is this in any way better than Flash? Cross-domain scripting? I could go on, you get the idea. Jump off the bandwagon before you hit the wall again!
Arkon
2 May 07 at 11:13 am
I’m not interested in killing Flash, it can go on doing what it does; I’m only saying that I don’t want to program for it because it’s a pain, and I have hope that Silverlight might be better. That and while Silverlight has a lot of the functionality of Flash, its implementation is much more similar to Mozilla’s Canvas tag.
In general though, I’m always interested in new solutions to make computers have better UIs because let’s face it, the way we program UIs right now is in the stone age, and there really hasn’t been much in the way of making anything better.
Paul Betts
4 May 07 at 9:48 am