Slingshot (Public Release)
Today Joyent is opening up the gates to Slingshot. Please check out Slingshot for Windows and Macintosh, along with a Rails plugin that makes it easier to get your Rails application working with Slingshot, and Radiant CMS running on Slingshot. It is all available from http://developers.joyent.com. I have said more about Slingshot previously (announcement, apologia, open source). We will be releasing the source code for Slingshot next month (June, 2007) under the GPL. There will be a commercial version of Slingshot with additional features and support options. The commercial version of Slingshot will be free to developers using Joyent Accelerators.
To celebrate the launch of Slingshot, Joyent is offering Large Accelerators for a year (a $1250 value) to the developers who best port an open source Rails application to Slingshot. Examples could be:
Etc.
Entries will be judged by Joyent. The criteria for “best port” is a combination of “ah-hah!”, “wow”, “nice”, “joyous”, “utility”, “functionality”, “originality”, “drag and drop”, “user experience”. The contest closes June 15, 2007. Please “register” for the contest by creating an entry on the developer wiki.
While Slingshot will always remain a work in progress, we have had success with a number of projects running on Slingshot. Joyent is committed to continued development of the project and your participation will help to make Slingshot a success. We hope you enjoy Slingshot.
Update: here’s the mailing list URL.
24 Responses
Cool. Will be great to see this take off.
So much for the developer side. When may Connector customers get to benefit from Slingshot on the client side?
My hat’s off to Joyent and MagnetK for putting this together. I’ve been playing with it for the last several weeks, and have learned a ton in the process. And, at the end, I have an application that my customers can use online or off. And while they might not be using it in an airplane, they do want to use it in their greenhouse, their farmers market booths, and many other rural places where connectivity is non-existent.
For folks in the Atlanta area, I’ll be giving a full presentation and live demo of Slingshot at tonight’s meeting of the Atlanta Ruby Users Group — http://www.atlrug.org
I too am quite curious as to when I’ll be able to use my Connector with Slingshot. Is this available in parallel today, or will that be released soon?
I look forward to a day where this is commonplace for web apps. Thanks for bringing us one step closer to the future.
Bijan and Wanderfowl,
We are working on Connector now and expect to have the Slingshot version ready in June.
Adding a room to the Connector house, but also reinforcing the foundation. [Wanderfowl, that one was for you.
]
Are you guys hosting the ported projects in svn or are the contestants expected to B.Y.O.Version.Control?
Hmmm… after several attempts to get something from the Radiant CMS example, I was reading the page about the VM and found the answer to my problem: the VM for OSX is Intel only….
Any plans to support PPC?
congratulations! on getting Slingshot out the door.
Trying to use the ported version Radiant CMS is a very frustrating experience. There is no help file, no README, all I get is a login screen where I cannot log in. What do I miss?
Gaba,
Radiant has its own documentation which you can learn more about here: http://radiantcms.org/
I also added the login and password (which is Radiant’s default credentials) to the wiki: http://developers.joyent.com/wiki/RadiantExampleApp Thanks for pointing that out.
Also feel free to join the Slingshot mailing list where you can ask questions: http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/slingshot
Scott
Thanks, Scott. I have found the login information on the radiant site a few minutes later, and added the login information to the wiki right away, so now the information is duplicated, which is much better than the previous situation.
No PPC and no proper rendering on Win32.
I better pass this time.
@Julik: We probably won’t do PPC because of performance issues. When the source is public, too, the community will be able to fill this omission. What do you mean by “no proper rendering on Win32”?
@David: We probably won’t do PPC because of performance issues.
When I bought my G5 Quad last spring I did consider using it as a Ruby dev machine, and about 70 percent of my clients are on PPC still. And I think the quad is still far above the performance margin for a rails addressbook. At the moment I have 3 PPC machines and they are in perfect working order, running all apps.
If this is connected with the syncing runtime it means that your synch-code is processor-specific and you need a PPC asm coder
which are not yet extinct.
With “no proper rendering” I mean just that – that the stuff effectively gets rendered by IE. The prospect of dealing with the same crap of a browser in mhy own application does not seem that much fantastic
one of the things I would really expect doing this kind of “app container” is being sure that it gets a proper browser engine under the hood.
To be clear – I never said that Slingshot is bad, but right now due to these two glaring omissions it is unusable, both for me and for my clients (although I was looking for a solution like that).
So it will be looking around who resolves the issues faster – Adobe or Joyent
Apollo currently destroys Unicode text but at least they took a wise decision to dump the IE web components altogether (and I assure you nobody will miss these).
I hope you are right and after the source is released it is going to be properly ported, also to X11.
Is anyone else’s javascript completely non-functional in Slingshot? I’m not seeing any errors – it’s just that my app appears to be a static web page.
@Julik: we’re looking into providing a PPC version sooner rather than later. We use WebKit on OS X because that’s the dominant browser. Same for Windows and IE. The logic for supporting IE on Windows is the same logic you employed to argue for a PPC version of Slingshot.
@Jon: there’s a mailinglist for Slingshot development.
http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/slingshot
David,
I don’t quite get the parallel logic in your example – using a non-IE rendering engine on the Windows client shouldn’t actually lock anyone out, whereas not building a PPC-compatible client on the Mac side locks virtually everyone out. Or are you saying that Slingshot isn’t bundling its own version of the renderer in either case?
@Nick: If a website is meant to work on Windows, it probably works on IE. That’s the dominant rendering engine on that platform. Remember, the Rails app that works in Slingshot can also used on the server that will be accessed by web browsers. So, I was arguing this approach (support the dominant) was similar to Julik’s argument that we should support PPC because it is still the dominant Macintosh platform.
Hmm. Let me try to diagram this.
Slingshot on Macintel only = lockout of PPC users
Embedded WebKit (for instance) on both platforms = lockout of Windows users?
I’m probably starting to appear combative and I don’t mean to — I’m just confused by the logic. If, as I intimated in my previous post, Slingshot actually is using the system-provided HTML renderer, then the confusion goes away.
Really, I don’t think it would actually change any of my design practices, because, as you say, we’d have to be testing for compatibility against IE anyway. But it would be very nice to be able to deliver a visually enriched (through CSS3 progressive enhancement) experience through Slingshot if it could rely on a better renderer on both platforms.
@david: Nice to know PPC will be available. Will take a look at Slingshot when it’s a fact.
The question concerning the renderer – it’s not the same. You dn’t have to support a renderer. Why settle for IE with Slingshot whereas if you use the container paradigm you can just bundle your own renderer with the machine? Granted, it will make the download bigger, but the relief on the designers/JSers would be immense. And granted, integrating Mozilla or WebKit is nowhere as easy as dragging IE controls in Visual Studio – but the outcome would be worth it. Maybe this is something the Magnetik foplks ought to be confronted with ASAP.
That said, I’ll be watching Slingshot with growing interest.
@Nick: Slingshot is using the system-provided HTML renderer. Well put.
@ David Young: any thoughts on bundling a renderer? fwiw, i really think it should be Gecko.
note: i’ve also posted this issue to the magnetk blog and the slingshot mailing list (let’s discuss this there): http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/slingshot
Any news on PPC support? this is a critical feature for me since I’m using RoR to replace an antiquated DOS app for my students, and about 1/3 of them are on PPC macs – hoping to transcend ties to a particular platform.