Silverlight on RAILs ?

[JuliasW]

Now that would be cool. 
 
We would get a great visual front end experience, and retain the excellent RAILs development environment for the Web Services & MVC Database Server back end. (aka Saphire Steel)

So I am really interested in Designing classy front ends in MS blend, Provding robust Client interaction via C# code behind, interatinsg with POX style RAISL Web Services, with the RAILS based Active Record, and Action Controllers.  (ASP.NET is simply too bloated and complex to get anything going)

I have tried to deploy my Silverlight Application, from WebBrick, by copying my Silverlight XAML, js to my Views Folder with the html file, and the compiled dll files Views/ClientBin.  But WebBrick does not want to play ball in serving up this dll file.  - I might try a client without any 'code behind dll', just a plain XAML Design.

Has anyone got any experience in serving up Silverlight Applications from RAILS ?

Cheers

Jules

[Huw Collingbourne]

I must admit I haven't looked closely at Silverlight yet. I tend to lump it together in my mind with IronRuby and so when I think of the possiibilities for dedicated Silverlight support by RiS I tend to think in terms of the release of the final implementation of IronRuby (those of you who frequent the IronRuby newsgroups will probably already know that we are currently fairly well advanced with an IronRuby form designer and we shall start talking about our plans for IronRuby support in the blog soon).

On the other hand, I have played around (a bit) with Flex front-ends for Rails and I guess that it should be possible to implement similar front-end support in Silverlight. I haven't tried anything very complicated with Flex but for simple apps it seems to be reasonably approachable. My basic approach was to render as xml - e.g.

Code:

render :xml => @post.to_xml

This can then be manipulated by the Flex front-end. As far as I can recall, the server didn't really have to 'get involved' too much in all this. I don't know if this approach works with Silverlight, however. Are there any Rails/Silverlight tutorials around that would help a Silverlight novice (like me) get started on this...?

all the best
Huw