jump to navigation

More OpenLaszlo August 28, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Video, Browsers, Trends, Standards, OpenLaszlo , add a comment

“Some conference that wants to sell me stuff” has a webcasted talk by David Temkin, Founder and CTO of the Laszlo corporation. For a majority of the time, he talks about why they chose to develop the Laszlo Webtop. It is a philosophy, and like all great arguments in computing, it comes down to philosophy, not technology.

I found said webcast after reading about it on Antun’s Blog, and he found me after my “really positive post” last week.

All this webtop vs. desktop is actually really interesting. I think some remarkable points from David’s talk are:

  1. Desktop makes it really hard to share data between more than one machine. I would add especially if they’re not on the same LAN/WAN.
  2. The fundamental GUI for desktops hasn’t changed at all in 20 years. This point is so much a part of the fabric of the desktop experience that it will take years to turn over.
  3. Downloadable and local apps with web enablement are something cool, but phishers and virus makers have forced us to be untrusting of anything we have to download. Even Apollo has warnings for installing 3rd party apps.
  4. There are still certain apps we need a full-fledged desktop for, like CD/DVD playing, ripping, burning. If we gave that functionality to the browser (with proper permisssion, of course), desktop apps could be replaced by web apps.
  5. Some enterprises are installing full-fledged versions of their intranet/portal/CRM on every employees laptop so they always have a full working copy of the app. This happens because business logic is not currently transportable in downloadable apps. Yes, not even with Apollo.

I guess I just summarized the whole thing for you, and you don’t really need to watch it any longer, but he says a lot more that I felt like I knew, and maybe you guys don’t know. Check out Antun’s Blog for info about how to access the webcast (you need to give them your name/email), then watch and learn.

Forget Flex, Go OpenLaszlo August 24, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Links, Video, Wikipedia, Reviews, Browsers, Trends, Standards, interface, OpenLaszlo, flash , 3 comments

Note: Mike G. from Central Florida PHP is giving a talk about Flex this Saturday at DeVry @ Millenia.

A good friend of mine, Jake, recently visited Orlando raving about Adobe’s Flex, and how it was going to make Flash development for people who think in HTML and Object-Oriented programming much simpler and faster. I went looking into Flex and discovered OpenLaszlo. Laszlo used to be a Flash-only framework, but it can now publish DHTML just as easily, and with a few added bonuses you don’t get with Flash, like including an iFrame.

After watching the OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial Screencast, I’m convinced that Laszlo is more capable than Flex, and there is less proprietary code to learn since you use Javascript instead of Actionscript. It’s all ECMA, XML and xPath, so I guess at some point it becomes 6 vs. a half dozen, but I will mention one small caveat: iPhone compatible. Oh yes, I’ve seen the first iPhone app in Laszlo, and it’s pretty and touch-screen happy. (I think it goes without saying that if it works on iPhone, it can work with all major browsers)

Am I raving? I’m not allowed to rave, because I haven’t tried both systems, but from where I’m sitting this is another situation where an equal amount of training and no expensive development tools are going to get your job done in the same amount of time, and end up being more flexible, easily extended and powerful. You can convince any boss of that if you’ve got all the information.

Under the hood from Wikipedia:

Laszlo applications can be deployed as traditional Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server be running the OpenLaszlo server.

Alternatively, Laszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in the manner lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and XML remote procedure calls.

Hear that? Static! One score for Flex is the ability to run as a desktop app (using AIR/Apollo), but that requires a download, and that’s a no-no on the internet.

Do you know Pandora uses Laszlo? That’s a pretty app, and yes it runs in Flash, but I bet it doesn’t have to. The Behr ColorSmart app is pretty nice too, and no hand-keyframed Flash? Love it. Wikipedia says Yahoo!, Earthlink and the Internet Archive are known to use Laszlo as well. I like those websites too.

Last but not least, it’s open source! Published under IBM’s Common Public License, which is a less-lawsuit inspiring type of GPL. Flex is supposed to be published under the Mozilla licensing, but that version is still in beta. Laszlo has been open source for 3 years now. Eat it, Adobe. I’m not giving you guys another penny.

I’ll be very proud to integrate some Laszlo apps into Petentials, which is built entirely on open source software - Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux.