Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th May 2008 13:38 UTC, submitted by gonzo
On his blog, Miguel de Icaza announced the first public releases of Moonlight. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, the company's Flash competitor. Moonlight is not yet free of bugs, though.
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Member since:
2006-02-05
I love javascript, but there are upper limits to its use in rich interfaces. GMail or Google Maps are good examples of the upper bounds of what a javascript ui can do.
Not only that, but like most web standards, the javascript spec is both poor, and has wildly different implementations on every browser, with plenty of gotchas, not to mention performance concerns (what might optimize on FF may just make things worse on Safari).
Thats not to say that there isn't alot that can be done well with js/xmlhttprequest. But when you start getting into web applications rather then web sites, you start hitting the limitations of the platform pretty quickly.
Java filled this void extremely poorly, so poorly that it was replaced by flash, which itself sucks for rich interfaces. Silverlight is made to fill this void, and does it extremely well.
As for not letting MS lead the way, where has FLOSS been for the last decade? This has been a known problem and discussed at great length, and a better alternative then flash would not have been hard, especially flash support in the *nix world has been piss poor for a very long time. You cannot completely ignore a huge problem space for alot of people, and then complain when a company comes out with a good solution for it.