Moonlight 3.0 preview offered for rich Internet apps

The release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3, said Novell, which sponsors Mono.

[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill reported last week on how Novell is positioning Mono technology as a mechanism for developing Apple iPad applications using Microsoft .Net platform technologies. ]

In a blog post this week, Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza, who has been in charge of Moonlight and Mono projects, described the release as the first preview of Moonlight 3.0.

Capabilities include MP4 demuxer support, although there are no codecs for it yet unless a developer builds them from source code and configures Moonlight to pick up codecs from ffmpeg.

Also featured is initial work on UI virtualization and a platform abstraction layer. "The Moonlight core is now separated from the windowing system engine. This should make it possible for developers to port Moonlight that are not X11/Gtk+-centric," de Icaza said.