We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.4 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page. It is the recommended platform for all application development for the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. OpenLaszlo 4.4 is another major release, with almost 180 bugs fixed since OpenLaszlo 4.3. The majority of bug fixes in this release are specific to the DHTML runtime; however, general improvements to all runtimes have also been added and we strongly recommend that you take advantage of them by upgrading.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2.X, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.4.

To migrate your 4.0.X or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

This release also has a number of improvements, and significant advances such as:

• Internet Explorer oddities have been resolved, such that it works similarly to FireFox and Safari.
• Context menus have been updated to work with DHTML.
• You can now use non-latin characters (such as Chinese and German) in CSS styles by using utf8 file encoding.
• DHTML now includes the "standard" debugger console, just as swf8 and swf9 do.

There is also an important change to the this behavior. In 4.2 and later, only declared attributes, i.e.: attribute name="myattr" … can be referenced lexically (without saying this.). The swf9 runtime will generate an error at compile time if you make a lexical reference to an undeclared attribute. For the swf8 and DHTML runtimes, the old behavior is supported but deprecated and may cause a compiler warning or error in future releases.

We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform. We'd also like to thank the incredible engineering team at G.ho.st, who have worked with us as a sponsor to bring SWF9 and many other improvements to the community. Special heartfelt thanks to André Bargull and Raju Bitter for their continued and amazing support of the project. Special recognition goes to community contributors: Sarah Allen, Andy Lubbers, Sarah Allen, Tim Dauer, and Mark Doeswijk.

SAN MATEO, Calif. (March 31, 2009): Laszlo Systems, a global leader in Rich Internet Application (RIA) software and the original developer of OpenLaszlo, today announced that its award winning open-source platform OpenLaszlo is fully qualified for Flash® Player 8, DHTML, and Flash® Player 9. Release 4.3 of OpenLaszlo is available for download at http://www.openlaszlo.org/download .

“With this new version of OpenLaszlo users of our G.ho.st ("ghost") Virtual Computer service are experiencing a 4 to 5x improvement in performance." said Zvi Schreiber, Founder and CEO of G.ho.st.

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We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.3 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page. It is the recommended platform for all application development for the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. OpenLaszlo 4.3 is a major release, with almost 300 bugs fixed since OpenLaszlo 4.2 introduced the SWF9 runtime.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2.X, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.3.

To migrate your 4.0.X or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

This release also has a number of improvements, and significant advances in these areas:

• Audio/Video APIs are working well in this release. Videoplayer and videoview now show the first frame of the video by default when they appear, if a URL has been set. (You can control this behavior with new starttime API.) Live broadcast and recording APIs are working in both swf8 and swf9. We have also added a new Audio & Video Programming forum
• Incubator components have been updated to work with the 4.3 code base.
• A new documentation comments feature has been added, so that you can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs or feature requests should be filed in our JIRA bug tracking system as in previous releases.
• An improved debugger to deal with deep and circular objects when printing. The 4.3 release adds two new properties of Debug: printDepth:Number, default 8, limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object when printing it; inspectPrintDepth:Number, default 1, limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object that is a property of an object when inspecting. The debug printer will also detect circular objects (rather than causing a stack overflow), at small cost in overhead. When an object refers to itself (however indirectly), it will be printed just as its type and ID.

There is also an important change to the this behavior. In 4.2 and later, only declared attributes, i.e.: attribute name="myattr" … can be referenced lexically (without saying this.). The swf9 runtime will generate an error at compile time if you make a lexical reference to an undeclared attribute. For the swf8 and DHTML runtimes, the old behavior is supported but deprecated and may cause a compiler warning or error in future releases.

We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform. We'd also like to thank the incredible engineering team at G.ho.st, who have worked with us as a sponsor to bring SWF9 and many other improvements to the community. Special thanks to André Bargull and Raju Bitter for their continued and amazing support of the project. Special recognition goes to community contributors: Sebastian Wagner, Justin Clift, Ryan Maslar, Sarah Allen, and Wolfgang Stöcher. And heartfelt thanks to Phil Romanik, Don Anderson, Josh Crowley, and Lou Iorio for their tireless efforts and significant contributions.

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 is the next fully-qualified release since OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.1, and is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2.

The 4.2.0.2 release includes more than 30 major bug fixes since 4.2.0.1; we have provided a link to the OpenLaszlo JIRA bug tracking system where you can view the details.

In addition to bug fixes, OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 contains two areas of improvement: documentation comments feature and compiler performance improvements:

The documentation comments feature adds a section at the end of every documentation page where you can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs or feature requests should be filed in our bug tracking system as in previous releases.

The compiler should be faster with 4.2.0.2 as compared to 4.2.0.1. The script cache is now disabled by default. Please note that setting the server logging level to DEBUG will slow down the compilation, due to the large amount of debugging information that is logged on the server. The DEBUG level logging is off by default.

For those of you who have 4.0.x or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

As always, we appreciate your involvement and OpenLaszlo reaps the benefit of your expertise and commitment. We'd like to especially thank the following folks out there in the community who helped make this release by suggesting improvements, filing bugs, creating test cases, and contributing fixes: the team at IBM, Andre Bargull, Sebastian Wagner, Raju Bitter, Gilad Parann-Nissany, Ammar Sh. Tazami, Justin Clift, Mohammad ZeinEddin, Michael Jessup, and Nasser Najjar.

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.1 is available now.

OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.1 is the next fully-qualified release since OpenLaszlo 4.2, and is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. This release addresses critical user-reported bugs primarily in the swf9 runtime, but also in DHTML.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.1.

For those of you who have 4.0.x or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

The 4.2.0.1 release includes almost 30 major bug fixes since 4.2; we have provided a link to the OpenLaszlo JIRA bug tracking system where you can view the details.

As always, we appreciate your involvement and OpenLaszlo reaps the benefit of your expertise and committment. We'd like to especially thank the following folks out there in the community who helped make this release by suggesting improvements, filing bugs, creating test cases, and contributing fixes: Andre Bargull, Sebastian Wagner, Ammar Sh. Tazami, Justin Clift, Mohammad ZeinEddin, Michael Jessup, and Nasser Najjar.

Posting this for Henry Minsky:

There is now a way for developers to add comments and examples to the documentation. At the bottom of every doc page is a link that lets you write a comment or tip. The comments will be sent to volunteer reviewers, and if approved will appear on the doc page.

The guideline for comments is similar to the PHP docs; you should add tips or code samples that clarify the documentation on that page. Questions and bug reports should be filed in JIRA or posted to the mailing lists or forums.

You can see the doc-with-comments feature on the docs on the nightly build only for now, for example the reference manual

http://labs.openlaszlo.org/trunk-nightly/docs/reference/

The comment-enabled docs are in trunk, so they will appear on the openlaszlo.org docs with the next release. Please try contributing some comments with the nightly build, so we can debug the comments system. Also send me a note if you want to be a volunteer reviewer.

--
Henry Minsky
Software Architect

We've released version 4.0.15 of OpenLaszlo. This is a bug-fix release for the 4.0 codebase of OpenLaszlo, and is available from the Download Archives page. Please note that 4.0.14 was never publicly released.

This release should be used by anyone programming in the 4.0.x release train. The current official release for OpenLaszlo is 4.2.0, available from the download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.2 is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. The major new feature in OpenLaszlo 4.2 is the introduction of the SWF9 runtime, which can offer significant performance gains. Unlike previous versions of the Flash player, SWF9 has much stronger typing requirements and you must modify your code to take advantage of the performance gains it offers. To assist you in upgrading your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2, we have provided various conversion scripts depending on your application goals.

To migrate your 4.0.X or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order

Late notice, since the call for papers is closing soon, but I just noticed this; CommunityOne is, among other things, looking for papers on RIAs -- so if you're doing something interesting with OpenLaszlo and want to talk about it, here's an opportunity.

CommunityOne is not as well known as its older brother, JavaOne. 2008 was the first year that I got to go. The event is going to be a bit bigger in 2009 — in fact, the event will be held both on the west coast and on the east coast. The conference is focused on “open source innovation and implementation”, and this year the conference planners are looking for talks on “cloud computing and virtualization, dynamic languages and scripting (PHP, Ajax, Python, Ruby, JavaScript), databases (MySQL, postgreSQL), web and application servers (GlassFish, Apache), operating systems (OpenSolaris, Linux), mobile development (Java ME, Android, Symbian), and tools (NetBeans, Eclipse, Sun Studio)”.

Here are the details:

CommunityOne East - March 18-19, 2009 - New York City
CommunityOne West - June 1-2, 2009 - San Francisco
Deadline to submit speaking abstracts: Dec. 11, 2008

(via Ted Leung; thanks, Ted!)

Google Maps in OpenLaszlo:

I wanted an example that:

* Embedded Google maps in a clean, developer-friendly way.
* Was full-featured (allowed a user to search for an address, and add a marker there).
* Passed information (such as where to add a marker) from the OpenLaszlo application to the map component.
* Passed information (such as the address of the marker that a user clicked) from the map to an object in the OpenLaszlo namespace.

Note that the Google Maps geocoding service is Flash-specific. Even though it passes XML back to the client, you need to use Google’s Flash-based APIs to call it. I didn’t want to do this; I wanted my example to perform the search in OpenLaszlo, and pass instructions to the map component. So I used Yahoo Maps’ excellent geocoding service.

Here are the instructions on how to do this

A great article by Antun on embedding Gogle maps in OpenLaszlo.

Nice thing is that this looks to work well for a project I'm looking at doing as well. Thanks, Antun!