Moonlight 1.0 – the open-source implementation of Microsofts Silverlight

Microsoft has been promoting Silverlight as a premium plattform for Rich Internet Applikations (RIA) and as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash and AIR plattform, respectively. Silverlight is natively available for Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS operating systems. Microsofts neglect of other operating systems such as Linux has been criticized earlier.

photo credit: ColorLoose

Now i have been notified by Novell that there is a Unix/Linux implementation of Silverlight released by the Mono project. Why Novell? Because it sponsors the Mono project. Gracefully the Mono guys entitled the implementation “Moonlight” and Microsoft has given its official consent for the port.

Moonlight – the open-source Silverlight

To date there is Moonlight 1.0.1 available which implements all Silverlight 1.0 Features. Miguel, one of the main developers of Moonlight, describes what can be done with the current version in his release announcement:

Moonlight 1.0 (and Silverlight 1.0) both come with a graphics pipeline, video and audio frameworks and a javascript bridge and neither one of them contains an actual execution environment. The execution environment is the browser’s own Javascript engine. When developers build 1.0-based plugins they script all of the functionality using the browser’s own Javascript engine.

This announcement is worth reading as it characterizes the process of working together with Microsoft on this open-source project.

So what can you do with Moonlight right now? The Register summarizes it well:

The goal is to let users on Linux machines play video and enjoy the same breadth of content and quality of experience enjoyed by users running Silverlight on PCs or even Macs.

On other side there have been reports (here and here) that not all sites treat it as a 1:1 implementation of Silverlight. But this may come later.

How to get Moonlight?

You can download Moonlight from the Go-Mono website.

Scott has posted a nice walkthrough of the install process on Linux using the Firefox browser.

The future

The Moonlight development crew is heading for the Silverlight 2.0 specifications. They want to port and release them as Moonlight 2.0. This means a whole load of new features for Rich Internet Applications running on Linux.

Personally i am skeptical whether that Silverlight will be a serious competitor to Adobe AIR. I work in the field of web technology and none of the agencies I know use Silverlight as a productive plattform for RIA yet. What about you?