* What is IronPython?
I had my annual meeting with Microsoft’s Jason Matusow last week. Our second “annual” meeting, to be precise. He’s director of Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative and I introduced you all to him last summer (see “A free lunch with Microsoft”, https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/nt/2004/0802nt1.html) when we met at the Open Source Conference. This time around, the venue was the Open Source Business Conference, held at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel.
While there were some new, interesting – some might say exciting – developments with SSI (which I’ll get to in a moment), we spent a good 20 minutes talking about Matusow’s new blog (https://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/). The blogspace Microsoft offers to its employees is beginning to provide rich dividends as people with the power to make changes in programs and initiatives – such as Matusow – are getting more direct feedback from the people who can gain the most from those programs and initiatives. In particular, Matusow was exuberant about the feedback he’s been getting to SSI’s latest offering, IronPython.
IronPython is a Microsoft version of the open source Python language. If you’re not familiar with Python, Network World’s Mark Gibbs did a series about it in his “Gearhead” column some time ago (https://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2003/0616gearhead.html). IronPython’s benefit is that it works in the Microsoft ASP environment. If you’re a developer, it’s worth looking into. Head to https://www.ironpython.com/ to download the package.
IronPython supports an interactive interpreter and transparent on-the-fly compilation of source files just like standard Python, but it also supports a static model so that source can be compiled to an .EXE file for stand-alone operation, or to a .DLL library, which can be called from other programs developed in C#, Visual Basic, C++, etc.
There are lots of open source applications and services that run in a Windows environment, it’s nice to see Microsoft not only contributing to the development community, but also actively initiating projects and encouraging open source developers.
Those were the two main points Matusow and I spoke about, but there were some other things related to SSI that have changed, improved or been initiated since last year and I’ll talk about those in the next issue.
