06.27.06

Introducing Legals

Posted on June 27th, 2006 in General, Development by jgrandy

Late last week, the OpenLaszlo project reached a huge milestone: release of the first source snapshot of our multiple-runtimes architecture, code named “Legals”. The purpose of this snapshot is to deliver infrastructure, tools, and architecture sufficient to allow broad community participation in the project.

We began Legals back in January because we felt it was finally time to invest in OpenLaszlo’s potential as a multi-runtime application framework. Adobe had released an initial beta of Flash 9 (then called Flash 8.5), and it was clear to us that it would be essentially an entirely new VM: new bytecode set, many improvements
to the ActionScript language, and substantially revised APIs. In order to support Flash 9 we would need to build a new compiler backend and new runtime libraries.

Simultaneously, the Ajax movement had been gathering steam and we thought that we had a window of opportunity to deliver a DHTML runtime as well. Ironically, the high cost of entry for Flash 9 created a situation where entering the DHTML/Ajax market had become relatively affordable, because the infrastructure work required could be amortised over two runtimes instead of just one. So we decided to do both: Flash 9 would create exciting new opportunities for the existing OpenLaszlo community, while DHTML would introduce OpenLaszlo to a new community and create a much larger market for OpenLaszlo application development.

(The fact that we have not talked about Flash 9 until now is partly engineering risk reduction and partly messaging. We wanted to begin with the most different runtime first—DHTML—in order to reduce risk as quickly as possible. We also knew that the DHTML announcement would be the bigger story and wanted to keep our marketing message simple.)

Simultaneously, we had been planning a set of infrastructure upgrades to improve project transparency and quality. In particular, our source control database was still behind the Laszlo Systems firewall and our build system was overly complex. The decision to do Legals put more urgency on these plans since our potential pool of contributors was about to become much larger.

After showing the potential of our approach in March with the LZPIX demo, we felt that the next step should be to fully open the project to community participation. So we decided that we would aim for an initial snapshot release with three
distinct goals:

  • Put in place the fundamentals of a multi-runtime architecture;
  • Port our development tools to the first new runtime target (DHTML); and
  • Invest in improved community-oriented project infrastructure.

And we have delivered on all three of these goals. With this snapshot, the basic architecture supporting multiple runtime targets is in place. We have the necessary development tools in place for both Flash 7/8 and DHTML, including a very nice debugging console in DHTML. And we have converted to an externally-available Subversion source repository and largely rewritten our build system.

The details are available on the Legals project page, but here is the headline message: if you’d like to help out with one of the most exciting, challenging web application framework projects on the planet, now is the time. Get involved!.