May 4th, 2007
Silverlight...coming soon to Linux
Miguel de Icaza recently said he would bring support for Microsoft's new Silverlight architecture to Linux by the end of the year. Silverlight, formerly called WPFe, is the new Microsoft technology that brings a subset of WPF, the .NET 3.0 interface development framework originally designed for Vista and that uses XAML, to the web. It enables more advanced web development using .NET technology, will support Windows and the Mac out of the gate, and is clearly designed to compete with Flash. Miguel de Icaza would be the person to ensure support in Linux, given his ownership of the Mono project, an open source implementation of .NET.
To my mind, Miguel's announcement is great news as I have always thought that .NET should be a bridge between development islands. Linux benefits because it plugs them into a massive developer ecosystem using technology Microsoft supports 100% while not sacrificing Linux' ability to support Linux-specific development interfaces. Microsoft, however, also benefits, through its status as the premier source of .NET tools and its ability to control the development direction of .NET on Windows. Pushing .NET beyond Windows gives Microsoft influence beyond its base while creating new opportunities to sell Microsoft technology to market segments Microsoft by itself could not reach.
I find the fact that Miguel's announcement involves Silverlight to be even more important. Baseline .NET support is essential, but enabling the "Web 2.0" extension of that technology is critical, as I expect, in the coming years, that people will grow quite tired of trying to cram high-feature applications through the eye of the HTML / CSS / Javascript needle.
I first started doing HTML back in late-1995. Clearly, it has come a long way since then, and Javascript and CSS have become as important to the web development process as HTML.
It's clear, however, that we have reached a point where we are overloading HTML / CSS / Javascript technology. I recently created a Javascript library to support animations in a web page. It has some rather interesting features, such as an acceleration / deceleration movement model (optional) which gave me the chance to dive back into some old Physics textbooks. It was also over 2000 lines long. Testing Javascript is an extremely slow process, and the language's untyped nature and pseudo-object orientation creates complications galore…
…and that was just for animations. You need much more than animations to drive a web application, and I imagine pulling apart the code of a reasonably-complex AJAX application would make my eyes cross.
HTML / CSS / Javascript was designed to support much simpler scenarios, and at the time, inaugurated innovations, such as an XML-like layout structure for user interfaces (before there was really XML) or instant updates (an accidental byproduct of a web page's location on a server), that were vast improvements over traditional standalone software development models.
The technology, however, is getting very old, and as we try to pour ever more complexity into our web applications, the technology starts to slow us down. You simply have to do too many things to perform basic operations in a web page, making current web technologies feel like assembly language compared to more modern programming environments.
Donna Bogatin had some rather critical things to say about Google's current crop of web applications. I wonder if those problems would disappear if they were to use something more advanced than existing web technologies (not necessarily Silverlight)?
A technology that serves both Microsoft's purposes and the wider developer ecosystem is a welcome addition, and a rare instance of the two sides meeting in the middle. I never expect Microsoft to build its own .NET implementation for Linux (but times do change, and who knows). That doesn't mean, however, they don't secretly welcome it when others do so.
I don't think it was accidental that Microsoft chose Novell as its premier Linux partner. Novell owns Mono, and Miguel de Icaza works for them.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/04/07
