In addition, the Redmond, Wash., software maker has announced that it will work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, an effort dubbed "Moonlight" that is based on the project started on mono-project.com .
The delivery of Silverlight 1.0, along with several user examples and a new partner program, is big news for the Microsoft technology, but that news is overshadowed by the company's sanction of the Moonlight project.
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"This is a big day from where I'm sitting," said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell, in Waltham, Mass. "This is a big effort on the part of Microsoft to work with Linux."
Key takeaways from Microsoft's announcements include the company's continued focus on its customers and its partnering with Novell as "a great extension to what we've been doing," said Brian Goldfarb, group product manager of Microsoft's Developer Division Platform & Tools Strategy.
"Explicit support for Moonlight shows that Microsoft is serious about challenging the conventional perceptions about how it competes in the market and that they are willing to do whatever it takes to establish an RIA [rich Internet application] platform with the broadest reach possible," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Microsoft's competitors just can't credibly say, 'Silverlight's a great piece of technology, but only works on Windows and IE.' It puts pressure on other RIA platform providers to deliver a platform with an equally broad reach to developers—and to do so quickly."
Chris Swenson, an analyst with The NPD Group, said the plug-ins being developed in the Mono project will give developers greater options.
"With the Linux version, developers will be able to target the .Net run-time on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, something that gets a lot of .Net developers very excited," Swenson said.
Microsoft's Silverlight will light up Linux. Read Joe Wilcox's blog.
When Microsoft announced Silverlight, a critical piece of feedback the company heard was about the "reach" of the technology, according to Goldfarb. "So we decided to do a partnership with Novell to deliver an implementation of Silverlight on Linux," he said.
Novell was "quite excited about Silverlight when it was announced," according to de Icaza. "We were watching it for some time, and when they began working on Silverlight 1.1, we really got interested."
Knowing that Silverlight would see widespread adoption, Novell engineers built a prototype of Moonlight with the help of Microsoft officials and later showed a demo of the technology, he said. "Now we will deliver a complete Silverlight implementation for Linux called Moonlight, and it will have complete parity" with Silverlight, he said.
Moonlight will support all the major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu from Canonical, Red Hat and Novell's own SUSE Linux, de Icaza said.
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Moonlight is "a complete reimplementation from scratch of the Silverlight specification," he said. "Look at it like the TCP/IP spec. Today, we're prototyping the [Silverlight] media stuff using an open-source library and using the Windows Media codec from Microsoft."
Goldfarb said Novell's approach of creating a reimplementation of Silverlight from scratch enables the company to deliver Moonlight as a true open-source project under an open-source license.
"We expect to have Moonlight available within six months," de Icaza said, noting that Novell is waiting for a test suite to help with the creation of the technology. He also said Novell is working on a version of Moonlight to support Silverlight 1.1, which itself is still under development. "We're aiming to be as close as possible to the release of Silverlight 1.1" with a supporting Linux version, he said.
Moreover, although Novell is running the Moonlight project, as an open-source effort it is open to outside developers who wish to contribute. "The effort is open source, and all of our code is available in our repository," de Icaza said.
Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using Windows Media Technologies, according to Microsoft officials.
Page 2: Silverlight in the Moonlight
Author: Darryl K. Taft
Previous news: 18 September 2007
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