Miguel de Icaza, who heads up the open-source Mono project, has provided an update on a project to create Silverlight applications that run out of the browser, moving a small step toward what Adobe Systems offers with AIR.
Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework. It lets developers use Microsoft tools and languages, like C#, to write applications that run on Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
Part of the Mono project is Moonlight, an implementation of Silverlight that runs on Linux. Silverlight is a browser plug-in for rich Internet applications.
De Icaza said that some of the Moonlight work aims to let people write Silverlight applications that run standalone, outside the browser.
That's not something Microsoft offers right now. Many people expect the company to do that to compete with Adobe's AIR, which lets people use Web tools to write desktop applications.
The "Moonlight desklets" from Mono run standalone outside the browser, too. But de Icaza made it clear that there's quite a bit of work to make it easier to write them for all Mono-supported operating systems.
He said once Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0 later this year, the task of writing standalone Silverlight applications will get easier. He also said that it would be a feature in Moonlight 2.0 while they are still working on the 1.0 version."We as a team can certainly create a Linux-only platform for these controls, and live happily with Mopen, but we would miss an opportunity of having something cross platform like AIR is.
"Ideally, Microsoft would follow our direction and implement and distribute the same Mopen functionality (the mechanism for creating stand-alone Moonlight desklets) that we have for Windows and Mac. This would ensure maximum adoption of standalone Silverlight-applications," de Icaza wrote in his blog.
The open-source Mono project will show off an early version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in running on Linux later this week.
Work on the plug-in, called Moonlight, was started only in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference. Moonlight uses version 1.1 of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications, which is due in the fall.
Once completed, Moonlight will allow Linux users to see Silverlight content on the Web, such as videos, and run rich Internet applications.
According to Miguel De Icaza, Mono project leader and Novell open-source president, Mono engineers have been working 14-hour days to create an implementation of Silverlight on Linux using Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software.
An alpha version of Moonlight will be ready for showing off later this week at a Microsoft Mix conference in Paris. (Microsoft also plans to show off its Silverlight-based Popfly mashup builder there.)
Moonlight, a Linux version of Microsoft's Silverlight, is already in alpha.
(Credit: Mono project)The Moonlight implementation was written in 21 days, De Icaza said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. He said it's not clear when it will be completely finished.
"We are pretty much feature-complete on the engine, but we have not done extensive testing, so right now every app shows stuff that is missing, but we will have something ready to release to the public by the end of the summer," De Icaza said.
Moonlight is written with a combination of C++ and C# code.
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