12.25.06

Tools for Porting 3.x Applications to 4.0B1

Posted on December 25th, 2006 in Documentation, Development by benshine

Going from a working Open Laszlo 3.x application to a blank screen in 4.0 can be frustrating; what do you do once you’ve downloaded and installed the new server, and your app just doesn’t show up? This handy guide should help you get your app to appear.

  1. Eliminate any errors or warnings that appear when compiling or running your app in the version of OL you had previously developed with, in the flash runtime of course.
  2. Eliminate compilation errors or warnings in the flash runtime in OL4B1. (lzr=swf8)
  3. Run in the flash runtime with debug=true. Eliminate any warnings or errors that appear in the Open Laszlo debugger. lzr=swf8&debug=true
  4. Replace any swf resources with stand-in png’s. (Don’t go through a laborious swf to bitmap conversion yet; just use some medium-sized png’s you have sitting around.)
  5. Eliminate any <font src=”foo.ttf”/> tags.
  6. Now run in Firefox 2 with lzr=dhtml. (It probably won’t work on the first try.) Same as above, eliminate compilation errors and warnings, then runtime errors and warnings.
  7. Install Firebug! Firebug is a totally crucial DHTML debugger. As of this writing, we’re using 1.0b7. It’s subtle though; it installs itself as disabled. Right-click on the little red x or green check in the bottom-right corner of the status bar, and select “Enable Firebug.”
  8. Run your app with firebug enabled. Firebug will almost certainly detect errors. Click on the Firebug error count to bring up the Firebug console. The console shows you the “compiled” javascript code, not your lzx source, so you have to be clever to find out where that code is actually coming from. It might be in the LFC, not your code; then you have to figure out where your code is invoking that part of the LFC. Usually you can fix these errors by taking out calls to unsupported API’s or adding a check for null. (See the release notes on dereferencing null pointers.)
  9. Use the “Net” tab in Firebug to monitor network traffic. Fix any 404s.
  10. Cycle through running with Firebug, the OL DHTML debugger, and the OL swf debugger, eliminating errors and warnings until there aren’t any more, while still making sure that you haven’t broken the swf code. Your app should start to appear at this point.
  11. Try running your app in the browser of your choice; for the best experience, stick to Firefox and IE7. Everything should work in IE6 and Safari, too. (list of supported browsers.)
  12. Still hosed? Read the release notes, consult the laszlo-user and laszlo-dev lists, ask a question in the forums.
  13. Find a bug? Great, we love bugs. Check the bug database to see whether someone else has reported it, and if not, file a bug.
Hope this helps; let us know if you get stuck… and thanks for trying us out.

12.21.06

OL4 B1 Candidate available

Posted on December 21st, 2006 in General by jgrandy

We reached a huge milestone today: our QA team has qualified and released a build (#3172) of OpenLaszlo 4.0 Beta 1, and we are making that build available for folks who want to take an early look in advance of the official release of B1 early in January.

The build is deployed on labs at http://labs.openlaszlo.org/lps-4.0b1. Downloads are available from openlaszlo.org.

If you are a member of the OpenLaszlo developer community and would like to preview this release, we would appreciate your feedback. For more serious development, and for those new to OpenLaszlo development, we recommend you wait until the official Beta is released in a couple of weeks.

We’re aware of four blocking issues with this qualified build, all of which will be resolved by the time we release Beta 1:

  • The Reference Guide is incomplete. We are essentially rewriting the tools used to generate the RefGuide, and the tools need a little more time before they can merge documentation from the LFC and the Components.
  • The Release Notes need a little more work. In any beta of a developer tool, release notes are an essential resource since they provide a capsule summary of all that has changed in the project. The release notes in this build are pretty good, but more work will be put into making them comprehensive and understandable.
  • In Safari on OS X, with the Pop-up Blocker turned on, the DHTML version of the Laszlo Explorer Welcome page does not always appear. Navigation to that page is triggered asynchronously, and in this case Safari thinks we are trying to pop up a window. A fix for this issue will be in the next build.
  • In IE7 in the DHTML version of Explorer, in certain circumstances the demo applications launch into the navigation pane rather than into a fresh window. A fix for this issue will be in the next build.

You can read more about OL4B1 in the release notes.

12.18.06

“Legals” becomes OL4; Beta approaching

Posted on December 18th, 2006 in General by jgrandy

I thought I’d share some Legals-related news with the community as we edge up to our first Beta release.

First, as we enter Beta we will be formalizing the product name as “OpenLaszlo 4.0″ or “OL4.” You’ll see less talk of “Legals” (or “Legal’s”) as a code name, and more talk of OL4. I expect that we will very soon see this release become the mainstream of OpenLaszlo development, and in anticipation it makes sense to position it as a successor to OpenLaszlo 3.x rather than as a separate project.

Second, about our first Beta release. We currently have a release candidate build in QA going through final qualification. Barring discovery of a significant problem, we expect to qualify this RC build later in the week, perhaps as soon as this Wednesday. We will make this RC build of OL4 B1 available on download.openlaszlo.org as soon as it it qualified. It is also available right now as a Tomcat deployment on labs.

However, the formal OL4 B1 release will be delayed until early January because the new Reference Guide is lagging a bit behind. The RefGuide needed work to support multiple runtimes and we took the opportunity to modernize it and to reduce the complexity of our doc tools. This work is going well, but a bit more slowly than expected. A beta isn’t a beta without complete reference materials, so we will hold up the B1 release pending completion of that work.