Moonlight: An Open Source Implementation of Silverlight
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Feeling left out because Microsoft's new Silverlight doesn't work on your system? You're not the only one. If you're dying to try out the multimedia environment, but you have a Linux-based system, you'll want to check out Moonlight. Keep reading for the details.
In October of 2008, Microsoft released Silverlight, a free runtime that powers rich application experiences and delivers high quality, interactive video across multiple platforms and browsers using the .NET framework. Unlike Flash however, it's only available for Windows and Mac, not Linux. This is where our topic of discussion comes in: Moonlight. Moonlight is a project to create a Silverlight plug-in for the Mono environment, which will run on Linux, Mac and Windows. We’ll get to that in a moment though …
Essentially, Microsoft’s first version of Silverlight was intended to be the company’s answer to Adobe, Flash, and Flex and several other rich Internet application and AJAX frameworks. Originally, the program manipulated its multimedia-savvy, Windows Presentation Foundation user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was only available as an alpha test at the time. Silverlight 3.0, aside from being more advanced than previous versions, now also enables mobile device support, starting with Windows Mobile 6 and Symbian.
Some of the dizzying array of features that Silverlight enables includes: animation, vector graphics, and the audio-video playback that characterize rich Internet applications. Now let’s face it: things move quickly in the digital age and no one understands that better than Microsoft. The tech giant realized that their Silverlight application, which had become wildly popular, needed a bit of a face lift to stay current in the increasingly competitive market it quickly found itself in.
So On March 18th of this year, Microsoft released a beta version of Silverlight 3.0. Unlike its predecessor, it’s compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operation systems. Since then, some exciting news has developed, especially for those that had previously hoped to run Silverlight with Linux.
It goes without saying that Microsoft’s Silverlight is the most comprehensive offering for the rapid creation and delivery of sophisticated applications through a Web browser. Forged from technology used in over 100,000 companies and understood by over four million developers worldwide, Silverlight has the full support of Microsoft's tools, technologies, and thriving partner ecosystem -- though some had complaints concerning the program’s functionality. There is a new development afoot, and it’s one sure to please those who were unhappy with Silverlight’s inability to work with Linux. A third-party free software implementation named Moonlight is under development and it will finally bring compatible functionality to Linux.
Next: What is Moonlight? >>
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