Raju Bitter

I was really happy when I scanned through my RSS reader today and discovered that OpenLaszlo 4.1 has finally been released! Laszlo first announced the work on the DHTML runtime in March 2006. I remembed when I first tested the LZPix application and how deeply impressed I was. Much time has passed since then and many community members have been disappointed by the information policy around the OpenLaszlo project. The 4.1 release was pushed back again and again, and there were no official announcements to the OpenLaszlo community when they could expect the 4.1 release to happen.

You wonder which browser are supported by the 4.1 release? Here’s a quote from the announcement in the OpenLaszlo blog:

OpenLaszlo 4.1 has been fully-qualified across the following browser/platform combinations: Safari3/OSX, Firefox2/OSX, Internet Explorer 7/WinXP, Firefox 2/WinXP, and Firefox 2/Linux. We have tested the full suite of demos, samplers, and example applications with the requirement that, when possible, DHTML applications behave the same as their SWF counterparts.

Looking for IE6 support here? It’s not there, but I always thought that - since all DHTML functionality is available in Flash8 - IE6 support in DHTML is not that important. If someone uses IE6, just deliver the same application as SWF8 to them instead of DHTML.

The amazing thing about OpenLaszlo is how well the transition from Flash to Ajax/DHTML and now even the upcoming Flash9/SWF9 runtime works. The LZX compiler has to support so different languages as ActionScript2, JavaScript and ActionScript3. SWF9 support should be released some time this year with version 4.2, and it’s already possible to compile smaller OpenLaszlo applications (like the Weather App) for SWF9.

I have the feeling that we’ll see a mobile runtime for OpenLaszlo in the near future which would turn OpenLaszlo into the RIA technology with the best outreach when it comes to supported browsers and technologies (DHTML/Ajax, Flash8, Flash9 and future runtimes). With the DHTML runtime in place it’s a lot easier to support other runtimes like Microsoft Silverlight, once Silverlight has a bigger market share. I personally don’t expect a Silverlight runtime in the near future, but who knows.

At this point I want to congratulate the whole OpenLaszlo team to the release and for the amazing work you have been doing in the past years. Laszlo entered a technology field which is targeted by huge companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun and Adobe. Feature-wise it’s not easy to compete with these giants, but OpenLaszlo and Laszlo always manage to impress me. Seeing the 4.1 release as well as the progress on the SWF9 runtime I’m convinced that Laszlo is on the right track to an even larger success.

When I saw that Adobe released an early beta of version 10 of the Flash Player I had a discussion with Henry Minsky of the OpenLaszlo team. I wondered if it’s possible to compile OpenLaszlo SFW9 apps (since they are based on AS3 code) with the Flex compiler for Flash Player 10. Well, see the result in the OpenLaszlo Blog: an example of the 3d APIs running inside an OpenLaszlo app.

What I really love about Henry is how he instantly picks up new technologies and starts building amazing things with them, like the proof-of-concept of an SVG kernel for OpenLaszlo. That very much characterizes the whole OpenLaszlo team.

Last week Laszlo announced a new application for Laszlo Webtop: Laszlo Calendar running inside Webtop! If you visited the project site of the OpenLaszlo project and have taken a look at the impressive demos you’ve probably seen the old Laszlo Calendar.

That application has - as far as I know - first been coded in LZX about 5 years ago but the UI prototype was created by Bret Simister of Laszlo even earlier.I’ve seen a few companies who either got inspired by the by the Laszlo Calendar UI state changes (take a loot at the  Scrybe Syncing calendar in the video on the iScrybe.com site). TopQuadrant even built a prototype for a semantically enabled version of the calendar.

The interface looks much more modern now. The transformation of the window size corresponding to the view mode is excellent, there’s a lot intelligence in the interface which is not directly visible.Here’s a screenshot of it, but if you want to try it register for a free email account at GoWebtop.com.

 Adam Wolff, the president of Elastic Process and former Chief Software Architect at Laszlo made a nice video explaining the UI and super user experience,  you’ll find the video in his blog. I don’t think there are many calendar apps - desktop or web - with such a sophisticated user interface, and this is only beta. 

Since January 14th OpenLaszlo version 4.0.8 is ready for download at the OpenLaszlo.org site. According to the release notes the following bugs have been fixed with this release:

• [LPP-2071] - __LzDebug.whyAlive() incorrectly reports leaking arrays with SWF8
• [LPP-5205] - Debug.whyAlive no longer shows reference keeping object alive
• [LPP-5217] - windows can leak memory
• [LPP-5321] - Serious memory leak for CSS styled nodes

Support for DHTML applications remains at “beta” level; it will be fully supported with OL 4.1. Until then, you can find the most recent DHTML bug fixes and support in the trunk branch (4.x nightly builds).

Henry Minsky of the OpenLaszlo team shows a first preview of the upcoming SWF9 runtime for OpenLaszlo. While there’s still a lot of work to do the announcement means good news for all OpenLaszlo developers. Adobe Flex is capable of generating SWF9 bytecode since version 2.0 but doesn’t support SWF7 or SWF8 bytecode generation - which OpenLaszlo does.

I’ve heard several people saying that they chose Flex instead of OpenLaszlo just for the better performance of the Flash9 player. Well, within a few months that shouldn’t be a reason any more - once the SWF9 runtime for OpenLaszlo will be released. There’s a wiki page on the SWF9 runtime effort on the OpenLaszlo wiki with more information. OpenLaszlo offers you an Ajax runtime as well and there are a great number of mobile devices with no support for Adobe Flash at all or only for Flash Lite (mostly byte code compatible with SWF7, which means that Adobe Flex application cannot be executed).

In December first news about a SWF9 virtual machine optimized for mobile devices could be heard: the Tamarin-Tracing VM. That’s even better news for the OpenLaszlo project. With a SWF9 runtime and Tamarin-Tracing on mobile devices the performance of Flash9 applications would be a lot better, and that’s true for OpenLaszlo SWF9 apps as well. Here’s a quote from Ted’s blog post on Tamarin-Tracing:

“The contribution of our early work on adapting our virtual machine to mobile devices supports this belief and we anticipate that this work will be deployed in Flash, over time, on both PC and non-PC devices. With this submission, we are also seeking the active participation of the best minds in the industry to ensure that Tamarin remains the leading VM for web applications high performing, mobile-ready, and standards compliant regardless of target platform.” - Gary Kovacs in Ted on Flex

If you are looking for an open source RIA framework with a great community and support for Ajax, SWF7, SWF8 and SWF9 later in 2008 have a look at OpenLaszlo, maybe starting with the OpenLaszlo explorer and Laszlo-in-10-minutes.

Since October 2004, the date of the open sourcing of OpenLaszlo, I’ve enjoyed working with the OpenLaszlo technology. 2007 was my OpenLaszlo only year, working as the OpenLaszlo community manager and evangelist, traveling the world and telling people about the huge potential of OpenLaszlo and the great company behind the technology, Laszlo. It’s still amazing for me to see how people all over the world are using OpenLaszlo, in many European countries, South America, Asian countries like India, Japan, Korea and China. I’ll miss working with all the great people I met at Laszlo, too many to name each one of you.

In a week from today I’ll start working for Optaros, an international consulting and systems integration firm that provides enterprises with online business solutions that leverage the next generation of internet technologies and approaches. Optaros held one of the Laszlo, Pizza and Beer events in Boston some time ago.

My interest is shifting a bit from using OpenLaszlo only to integrating rich Internet applications with Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL and SPARQL. I’ll do a separate post on that topic with more information, soon.

Greetings to everyone in the OpenLaszlo community. I’ll never forget 2007, meeting so many enthusiastic OpenLaszlo community members. Special thanks to David Temkin and the OpenLaszlo team for the wonderful year I had with all of you.