Two interesting things happened last week here at Laszlo headquarters: one, OpenLaszlo 3.2 was released. It includes lots of good new stuff, but the release notes gloss over this change: the script compiler is about five times faster(!) than it was in 3.1. Why? We ported the script compiler from Jython to Java. (and by “we”, I mostly mean “Tucker”)
I figured that the Laszlo Mail codebase would make a decent real-world benchmark. So I compiled the LZX piece of Laszlo Mail from scratch, with an empty cache, on my Thinkpad T42 (1.7ghz, 1 gig RAM) Here’s the compile times:
OpenLaszlo 3.1: 95 seconds
OpenLaszlo 3.2: 34 seconds
That’s pretty flipping good.
Right. So the second thing that happened is that we got a shiny new MacBook. Today I compiled LaszloMail on a co-worker’s desktop G5, and the shiny Intel thing. Ready?
ECMA-262 Edition 3 (http://www.mozilla.org/js/language/E262-3.pdf among other places) specifies (13.2.2 [[Construct]] in function objects, step 7) that the result of new C for a function C is the value returned from C if that value is an object.
What browsers fail to get this right?
This:
var foo = {toString: function () { return "the only Foo"; }};
function Foo() {
return foo;
}
works in Opera 8.52,
Firefox 1.5.0.1 and
IE 6.0.2900 on Windows. It works in Opera 8.52.2190, Firefox 1.5.0.1, and Safari 2.0.3 on OS X. You can try your favorite browser by pushing this button:
Unfortunately for us, it does NOT work for any Flash player, and one of our target runtimes is Flash.
There has been some crazy, crazy work going on here in the last month or two and the result is amazing. Today at etech, we’re demoing an early alpha of OpenLaszlo’s new DHTML backend. Truth! Press Release!
Please join Laszlo Systems in San Francisco for an evening of pizza, beer and OpenLaszlo AJAX development on Thursday, March 16th. We are going to be previewing an exciting new DHTML runtime for the OpenLaszlo platform, enabling you to run applications in a browser without the Flash plug-in.
See here to let us know if you can make it. We’re also looking for OpenLaszlo developers who would like to give a short demo at this event — let us know on the same page.