Moonlight Desklets – Mono desktop widgets

The Mono project team created a desktop widgets environment similar to SuperKaramba or gDesklets. While in early development the C# based project has interesting features like running separate or combined sandboxes.

The Moonlight Desklets project is a product of Novell’s Hack Week where Novell’s hackers were free to spend time on personal FLOSS ideas. Technically, Moonlight Desklets are based on the free Silverlight implementation Moonlight and therefore also based on the free .Net implementation Mono.

And the first results do look pretty nice:

The widgets can be created in C# and it is planned to add support for all Mono supported scripting languages like Boo, IronPython and Javascript.

But most interesting is the sandbox model: with the help of a simple start parameter you can choose if you like to start a widget in the same virtual machine as another widget or if you prefer a new virtual machine. This makes especially sense for unstable (=development) widgets where you don’t want a crashing widget to take with it all the other widgets. I do wonder actually how KDE’s Plasma will handle this kind of things.

Anyway, this is definitely a project to keep an eye on, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gnome community would quickly adopt this new technology.