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In an increased effort to boost adoption of their Silverlight development platform, Microsoft will support the use of Python and Ruby programming languages for client-side development. Announced in late May at the RailsConf conference in Portland, Oregon, John Lam (lead of the IronRuby project at Microsoft) gave developers the good news. He told eWeek, “If you’re a Ruby programmer and you like Ruby as a language, context-switching into JavaScript is just something you have to do. It’s a tax.” The Silverlight support for what Microsoft is calling ARAX and APAX will eliminate this tax and allow Microsoft’s RIA plugin to gain some ground against Adobe.

Many developers of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) use JavaScript in the browser. The use of this language for web development is called AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ruby and Python were previously used on server-side development, but programmers employing these languages would have to switch to AJAX for client-side development or use a utility to make the conversion. The plan to support Ruby developers through Silverlight is a bold move from Microsoft, and it may attract users.

In an interview with InfoWorld, Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft said, “What we’ve done through Silverlight is to make it possible to use Ruby or Python as an alternative to JavaScript for building the same types of applications…All the browser needs to have is Silverlight installed and then developers can take advantage of these languages.” Silverlight is meant to compete with Adobe Flash, which is the current standard for many RIAs and video-intensive sites. With the release of Silverlight 2.0 later this year, the ARAX and APAX features will be available for those who prefer Ruby or Python.

While the impact of this announcement is not yet being felt, it has certainly stirred up interest in Silverlight among developers. Popular tech blog Slashdot’s coverage of the news prompted many diverse opinions. One commenter writes, “It [Ruby and ARAX] just seems like Java for people who hate Java.” Another opines, “Microsoft knows that web applications will soon threaten their client-side sales model. They also know that places like Google have enough of a head start in the AJAX world that they will never catch up…they want to make life hard for people trying to develop in AJAX.” Despite these criticisms, Silverlight does indeed support JavaScript, in addition to VisualBasic and C#.

As with all things Microsoft, it is difficult for the company to simply show good intentions. Whether the move was meant to attract Ruby developers or challenge Flash, it is a step forward for cross-platform, cross-language development. For their part, Microsoft has no illusions about the impact of their decision. As John Lam put it to eWeek, “Our goal was to show that Rails guys could use Silverlight as well…And if you wanted to use Ruby to do some HTML stuff, if you want to do ARAX on the client, awesome. Knock yourself out.”

Thursday, June 26th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Haley January Eckels