OpenLaszlo has a new proposal for adding Section 508 compliance to the LZX language. Please review it when you get a moment and let us know what you think.

OpenLaszlo also has a proposal to add an inline <img> tag within HTML text. Please review it when you get a moment and let us know what you think about that proposal too.

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You can now read, search, and subscribe to the OpenLaszlo mailing lists on the GMame mailing list gateway. As of October, all three OpenLaszlo mailing lists – laszlo-user, laszlo-dev, and laszlo-announce – are mirrored on GMame.

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The Laszlo Mail team is too busy to toot their own horn, so I'll do it for them:

Robert Scoble writes:

David Temkin, founder and CTO of Laszlo Systems, is bragging to me about Laszlomail - a Flash-based email client. They’ve been licensing it out (EarthLink licensed it out). He tells me they just made it available for free on the Web. Looks very interesting. What do you think?

Nirav Mehta has some tips about debugging web services in OpenLaszlo.

Have been working on web services with Laszlo and I am hitting on some errors! Guess they will be helpful for anybody who’s going to use this.

He's using SOAP, with the <remotecall> tag.

Can't get enough of your OpenLaszlo fix? This lonely blog isn't all there is. Check out the new list of blogs on the OpenLaszlo wiki. Or, for single-stop shopping, read them all at Planet Laszlo.

You can also keep track of OpenLaszlo postings with Technorati. You can search Technorati by text or tag. Read here about how to put the "openlaszlo" tag on your own blog.

Join us in the blogosphere, and blog away!

A lot of people have admired and asked about the Laszlo Mail tooltip. I've submitted it for review, see LPP-918 if you want a preview. It should show up in the incubator after Max has a chance to take a look at it. It was originally written by me, then made beautiful and more usable by Bret Simister, Scott Evans and Peter Andrea.

Using it is straightforward. The tooltip is declared as a child of whatever view the tip is for:

<button text="Do Something">
      <tooltip>some helpful text goes here</tooltip>
</button>

When creating it, I had a few requirements.
1) For good performance all tooltips should use a single view
2) Ideally the "look" of the tooltip should be de-coupled from the functionality, so its easy to change.

I decided to take a pretty simple approach by defining an instance called "tooltipview" which initially had the simple requirement of needing a "text" attribute. Later, it evolved to need a "setPointerX" method which determines where the little pointer shows up.

It has a similar design to the components dragstate or resizestate, in that it acts on its parent. At init time, it starts to listen to its parent's "onmouseover" and "onmouseout" events (by creating a couple of delegates). Then it shows the tooltipview onmouseover and hides it onmouseout. I made the tooltips initstage="late" so that the whole app would init before any tooltips do. This may make it so that tooltips don't show up in the first seconds of interacting with the application, but I thought that was the right tradeoff.

Over time, the tooltop has gotten a little fancier to meet requirements that it align differently sometimes. It is still a work in progress. The beauty of open source is that now you can pick it up and use it in your projects and if you make it better, you can submit your improvements back to the community.

Sidenotes: In looking at the code now, I see a number of things I would change. I'm tempted to fix them now, but it is Saturday morning and I've got breakfast and gardening yet to be done:

• The tooltip "showTip" method calls: canvas.tooltipview.bringToFront( this.text ); I have no idea why that works, since I don't think the view method "bringToFront" takes a parameter, but the text ends up getting set. Hmmm. Maybe Max will figure that out in review.
• The tooltip class should extend "node" not "view" which is the default if you don't specify anything in the class declaration. The tooltip has no visual elements in itself, and nodes are slightly faster to create than views.
• oninit event should really override init instead. First, its a bad idea to use events in classes without specifying a name for the method, since a subclass will not be able to control the order that the code executes. (Events are executed in non-deterministic order, but you can control what code you write before and after super. For more detail see best practices wiki page.) Also, plain old methods lead to slightly smaller and faster code than events. There are lots of good reasons to use events, but in this case, a method is the right choice.

Our friends on the Laszlo Mail team have started a project blog. Check it out, at http://www.laszlomail.com/blog.

From Scott:

http://bryanrieger.com/2005/11/10/fish-and-widgets/

here's the app:
http://yiibu.com/wp-content/widgets/andaman/laszlo/index.html

I really do think LZX is cool to create lightweight, dynamic apps like
this.

And I think it's cool that the source for this is only 100 lines, too.

The OpenLaszlo project blog was created on October 27, 2005. It was announced on November 9. Why then does it have postings dating back to 2004?

One of the goals of the blog was to replace the news items that had been manually edited into the openlaszlo.org home page since the site was launched. I've replaced those items with the last few, and a pointer to the archive here. That required importing those news item from HTML into the Announcements category of this blog. In other words, the blog itself is only a month old, but its content really does go back more than a year.

Another goal was to capture all the internal mail pointing out OpenLaszlo mentions and sightings, so that we could share them outside the company without having to blast them laszlo-announce. (That list was intended to be lower volume than this blog will be.) So, taking a leaf from Tucker's book, I copied all the items I'd been saving to someday announce, and imported them here as blog postings. Again, the content is older than the blog.

I had some qualms about backdating posts. It makes the blog look older than it really is. I was originally planning to move all the dates to the day the blog went public. But instead, in true blogger nature, I'll just write about the decision here. After all, it gives me something else to post

Laszlo Systems, the sponsor of the OpenLaszlo project, launched a hosted preview of the Laszlo Mail application today. We encourage you to try it out at http://www.laszlomail.com, to tell your friends, and to send the developers your feedback.

This is an excellent example of the kind of application that can be built using the OpenLaszlo platform.  We congratulate the Laszlo Mail team on this exciting new application.  As Jonathan Boutelle says : " It feels like a candy-coated swiss army knife, an appealing mix of aesthetics and pragmatic design."

You can read about some of the best practices and performance optimizations that the Laszlo Mail team (and others!) have contributed, on the OpenLaszlo wiki.

From the product page:

Laszlo Mail puts a high-polish interface on Web mail with features and performance that outshine others - consistently in any browser. The design center of Laszlo Mail focuses on high quality of user experience where the application uses dynamic layout and animation changes to help users to stay oriented within application interfaces and efficiently complete email tasks.