Open Source Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight & Moonlight

When Microsoft released Silverlight, the open source community gained a flexible and consistent model for delivering high-quality audio and video to all major browsers. In this session, participants will learn how to leverage this new platform to develop rich Internet applications.

What is Silverlight? Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. The introduction to this session will demonstrate how-to install Silverlight on Windows and Mac client computers, and then demonstrate that open source dynamic languages (like Ruby, PHP, and Python) work seamlessly with Silverlight applications. This portion of the session will explore various web server deployment scenarios, including ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby, and others.

However, with the release of version 1.0, the open source community received even better news when Novell announced that they would deliver Silverlight support for Linux using the Mono project. From this collaboration, Novell developed project Moonlight, which has as goals:

• To run Silverlight applications on Linux.
• To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications.
• To reuse the Silverlight engine to develop desktop applications.

The session will continue with an explanation and demonstration of how to install Moonlight, and reproduce previous demonstrations using Moonlight. The session will continue with instruction and demonstration illustrating how to create basic Moonlight applications using XAML. Included within the session will be Moonlight development examples that function with various open source dynamic languages, such as IronPython and IronRuby.