I have set myself a goal of making Silverlight and the DLR the premier method of scripting the web. I love JavaScript, but I love Python more and I like the freedom to choose languages and paradigms most of all.
So I started this afternoon since I bugged out of work early for a doctor’s appointment. I only have a Mac at home, and although I virtualize Vista on my machine I want to do all of this development in OS X since most of the leet haxors I know use OS X.
I was expecting some hassle here for sure. I downloaded and compiled mono, which was a bit of a pain but I basically followed this post. I recommend you just download the dmg instead (more on that later). Then I got the SDK, which is packaged as a separate release until SL 2 is RTW. Turns out starting an app is as simple as this:
> script/sl [ruby|python|jscript] <application_name>
> script/server /b
And a a sample page of your control pops up in your browser, served by the .NET app Chiron. The XAP is generated on the fly. If you’re developing alongside a backend framework like django then just plan to serve your XAP and scripts off of a separate port and everything is easy.
Basically I’m way impressed that this is so easy; the only hiccup I had was that Chiron would mysteriously 500 while trying to generate the XAP. The first thing I tried in order to debug it was switching to the packaged binary of mono instead of the built from trunk version, and it started working immediately. Not a big problem. So stay tuned while I try to develop some traditional webapp building blocks in dynamic languages + Silverlight.
[on an unrelated note, I just noticed that this site looks like ass on IE. sorry about that, I'll fix it as soon as I have time. I just got Vista running at home a few days ago.]