Moonlight 1.0 puts Silverlight on Linux

12.02.2009
Moonlight 1.0, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media application platform, was announced Wednesday for Unix and Linux systems, said Miguel de Icaza, the Novell developer who has been in charge of the project.

Moonlight is offered as a plugin that can be used in Firefox 2 and 3 on Unix systems using the X11 windowing system.

[ As Microsoft expands its RIA platform's reach, it is also ]

"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," de Icaza, a Novell vice president, said in his . "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." 

runs on both 32- and 64-bit systems. Moonlight 1.0, which was based on Silverlight 1.0, actually was released on January 20, for streaming of the Presidential inauguration.

Developers now are working on Moonlight 2.0, which will be compatible with . "It's a very nice upgrade over Silverlight 1.1," offering easy development of GUI applications, de Icaza said in an interview on Wednesday.