Alarming Patent Suit Filed Against Microsoft
A company named Vertical Computing Systems Inc. is suing Microsoft for a patent violation involving Microsoft’s .Net framework. The patent is for a “system and method for generating web sites in an arbitrary object framework.”
Let’s hope this patent doesn’t place countless other Web and application frameworks into Vertical Computing’s cross hairs.
JRuby + Ruby.net = Tipping Point
Is it just me or does it seem like there hasn’t been that much coverage of Microsoft’s recent comments on Ruby? Microsoft says “they have a lot things going on (with Ruby), but nothing to announce at this time”. This seemed like big news to me and got me interested in what’s going on with Ruby for .Net, so I did some looking around.
It turns out there is a project, Ruby.net, already in development. The project Web site also says that Microsoft is “providing financial and technical support for the project”. Hmmmmm.
Its been very well publicized that Sun hired two members of the JRuby team. And just a week or so ago, Sun made some big annoucements regarding Ruby support in the NetBeans IDE. The fact that Sun is already on board with Ruby and that Microsoft seems close to doing the same is a huge development.
Companies developing on both the J2EE and .Net platforms will soon be able to have their developers code for both platforms using one language. While Ruby is already hugely popular with the Web 2.0 crowd, the adoption of Ruby in the enterprise has not been as fast. But if what I read in the blogosphere is any indication of reality, then there are a ton of enterprise developers already learning and evaluating Ruby and Rails. So if Microsoft jumps on board to offer formal support for Ruby to the level Sun has, I’m betting we see an explosion in Ruby development to a much higher degree than we have seen already.
Update 4/30/2007: Microsoft announces IronRuby.