The developer of the Moonlight software that enables Silverlight applications to run on Linux computers said on Monday that he is ready to start publicly beta testing an update to the software.
In a blog posting, Miguel de Icaza said the beta of Moonlight 2.0 is available from the gomono.com Web site.
Moonlight 2.0 is aimed at achieving compatibility with sites written for Silverlight 2.0, but incorporates the media pipeline and a few other features of Silverlight 3.0, de Icaza said. Microsoft released Silverlight 3.0 last month.
The beta is available both as source code and as a plug in for the Mozilla browser.
Work on Moonlight first started in 2007, with a beta of the original version released late last year and the final version released in February.
While Microsoft's Silverlight recently went 1.0 for Mac and Windows users, the last time we got a progress report on the version for Linux called "Moonlight" was early September. In a report by eWeek, who was covering today's XML Conference in Boston, Novell's vice president of developer platforms, Miguel de Icaza, noted that not only is Moonlight set to release within the next six months, but they're working on getting support for all major Linux distributions. De Icaza is also quoted as saying he didn't want Moonlight to lag behind Silverlight in development, but then went on to say he expected Version 2.0 of Moonlight to make its way to users six months to a year after Mac and Windows users.
Since launching in late April, Silverlight has already shown some promise with more than 90 featured applications made by various developers, more than 40 of which were added within the last month and a half. While it hasn't made nearly as much of a footprint on popular Web sites as Flash from Adobe, the development platform is still very young.
Previous Silverlight coverage:
Silverlight goes 1.0, adds Linux support
'Moonlight' makes progress on Silverlight for Linux
Talking up Silverlight on the Real Deal podcast
What is Silverlight, really?
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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