Rich Chumby Application?
We received a Chumby at the office late last week. This caused quite a bit of stir: delight, astonishment, even some bafflement (quickly overcome). If you don't know, a Chumby is a clock radio sized computer with a touch screen and a soft, fabric-clad, bean bag-filled body. It's got integrated wifi and runs Flash Lite 2 (FL2) on top of Linux.
We received the Chumby -- they are not yet on the market -- because we told the good folks there that we would see what we could do about getting OpenLaszlo to run on the device. FL2 is compatible with Flash 7 content, which makes it theoretically compatible with OpenLaszlo 3.x and later. We experimented previously with running OpenLaszlo apps in FL2, with some success, so it will be fun to see if we can make more progress with this device.
Thanks to Chumby Industries for the opportunity, and we're looking forward to producing the first "Rich Chumby Application"!
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Glad to hear you got the chumby okay. If any ongoing “bafflement,” please contact me. It would be cool if you guys could make this happen.
January 27th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I get a lot of feedback on OpenLaszlo from people. And one of the questions constantly coming up right now is: Does an OpenLaszlo app run on Flash Lite 2.x? It would be great to support that version of Flash, too.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:50 am
Any update on using OL with the Chumby? I just got a device and I’m lookkng for a dev environment.
February 27th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Hi Steve,
We looked into it, and there’s one known blocking issue currently. All versions of OpenLaszlo currently write to _root, so they probably (*) cannot be sub-loaded within an existing Flash movie clip. Chumby subloads content, so OpenLaszlo-generated swfs do not currently load within Chumby.
There are two avenues of exploration here. First is to verify whether Chumby is calling lockroot() before subloading content; this not, adding this call *may* make it possible to load OpenLaszlo apps on the Chumby.
The second approach is to modify OpenLaszlo to no longer write to _root. We’re about 95% there with OL4, but there are still a few places left in the code. This will be a priority after we ship 4.0.
And, a belated answer to Raju’s question. OpenLaszlo does run within Flash Lite 2. However, at least on the Nokia 6681 we tried, the heap size was only 800k or so, and was quickly exhausted. There is work to be done before OL will run within small, static-sized heaps. However, I understand that newer smart phones have a larger FL2 heap, and some of the newest Nokia phones even have a paged memory model, so there is reason to hope that we’ll have a better story there soon.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
OpenLaszlo Rules!!
OpenLaszlo+Chumby needs to happen. It would be unbelievably cool.