Hi all,
Just a quick note regarding the current status of Silverlight support in
Phalanger. I wanted to mention this in my last e-mail, but unfortunately I
forgot to do that.

I spent some time recently trying to port the existing Phalanger
implementation to a Sliverlight platform. In general Phalanger is currently
built on .NET 2.0 and uses some advanced techniques of CLR (Reflection.Emit)
to compile the PHP code dynamically. Silverlight 1.1 contains slightly
limited version of .NET 2.0 (and CLR), which luckily includes everything
needed to run Phalanger as well (the key thing is dynamic code generation
using Reflection.Emit). Just to put things in the context - DLR (Dynamic
Language Runtime), which runs IronPython & IronRuby is a library built on
top of the limited (Silverlight version) of CLR, using the same things as
Phalanger (especially Reflection.Emit) in a similar way as Phalanger does
currently.

This means that when porting the Phalanger to Silverlight I took the easiest
approach, which was to modify the existing implementation to use only
features available on Silverlight (and remove all the things that are not
needed there), without doing any big changes in the core implementation.
(This was the easiest thing to do to get it running, but of course it is
just a rough start - in the future we'd like to use DLR and in my opinion it
would be perfect if we could make this important transition as a project
done by the wider PHP community).

Anyway, the important thing is - I checked-in the sources for this version
to our CodePlex project, so if you're interested in the techniques we're
using, you can find the source here:
*
http://www.codeplex.com/Phalanger/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Also, I implemented a little Silverlight game as a demo (the sources are
included), so here it is:
* http://tomasp.net/files/copter/default.html 

I didn't promote this anywhere on the internet so far, so please wait with
mentioning this more widely until we make more clear decision about the
future of PHP on DLR and Phalanger. It is indeed very visually attractive
and the PHP source code for the game looks wonderfully (when compared to
some ugly things that have to be done in C#:-)), but it is really just a
very rough start. 

I however hope that once we announce it more widely it will attract people
and it may help us find more people (from both .NET and PHP worlds) who
would be interested in helping us to implement this properly using DLR
(where possible).

Thanks,
Tomas