Making the OpenLaszlo community shine – a new face on the OpenLaszlo team
In December 2006 I was approached by the Laszlo folks from San Mateo.They were looking for a community manager for the OpenLaszlo community. David Temkin asked me if I’d be interested in filling that position for Laszlo Systems. Wow, how exciting is that!? I’m a huge fan of the technology since October 2004 when Laszlo turned the Laszlo Presentation Server into the open-source OpenLaszlo project. And I’ve been working with the Laszlo Studios in 2006 on some projects, which was a great experience. But joining the company from out of the community was like a dream coming true for me.
So I went to San Mateo in January, spent an impressive week at the Laszlo Systems office in San Mateo meeting so many people whose names I’ve been seeing in the mailing lists, forums and whose blogs I’ve been reading. Many things around the OpenLaszlo project became much clearer to me when I gained insight into the development process of the OpenLaszlo platform. The development speed shown by the OpenLaszlo team was incredible. Almost the whole development team was gathered in San Mateo at that time. I remember a meeting when we set down to define which features would have to be implemented by the team in January. Jim Grandy and his team came up with an ever growing list of tasks. I thought to myself: How are they going to implement all of that by the end of January? Well, they did.
It’s a good thing to see the performance of the OpenLaszlo team, but there’s a problem connected to that: How can open-source community members be integrated into the development process and turned into committers? Especially the Flash runtime requires deep knowledge of the server internals once you get to the Laszlo Foundation Classes (LFC). With the new DHTML runtime it’s a lot easier to become involved in the server development. The JavaScript knowledge required is much more common among web developers. One of my major goals is to make the process of contribution to the OpenLaszlo server sources easier for outsiders. That process will be started right after the release of OpenLaszlo 4.0.
Does that mean that there are no outside contributors for the OpenLaszlo server? No, we have contributors from around the world. But most of those valuable activities take place in the area of LZX component development. We definitely are looking forward to increasing the number of contributors working on the runtime platform.
I have chosen a slogan for my work as a community manager: “Making the OpenLaszlo community shine!� What do I mean by that? Every community member using the OpenLaszlo technology invests time and energy into learning LZX, helping other community members in getting their problems solved, evangelizing OpenLaszlo and improving the OpenLaszlo server by delivering feedback and contributions. In an open-source community I consider the community members to be the heroes. So my job is to make you shine.
Every single one of you adopting OpenLaszlo is an important member of the community. We have many OpenLaszlo applications out there which we (the community) don’t know about. I want to feature those applications, show what great work you are doing. Single community members will be interviewed about their experiences with OpenLaszlo and the community. The interviews will then be posted in this blog, starting with a young developer from Hungary. We’ll hold global and local community meetings and make the OpenLaszlo experience a more personal one. I wish that many more of you get the chance to meet the awesome team around Jim Grandy and experience the openness around OpenLaszlo.
Making the community shine is nothing I can accomplish on my own. I need your help and support as well. So I’m asking you: Get back to me with positive and negative feedback, with ideas on how to improve our community. I hope that you’ll enjoy the community in the future as much I did in the last 2 1/2 years. OpenLaszlo's potential is huge: J2ME, mobile AJAX, SVG and Flash Lite, where will the server be heading in the next months and years? You all can play a role in defining the direction into which OpenLaszlo is moving and the success of this open-source project.
Raju Bitter
OpenLaszlo Community Manager
March 5th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Nice to see some blogging on a personal note. Keep it up and it will be great to see you keep the community updated about Laszlo developments and spur it along.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Hi Raju,
I went into OL Legals a few weeks ago, and I think it is a nice technology, quite impressive on his possibilities.
I made an interactive catalog for a training company in less that 3 days, and the lurning curve is good.
The main drawback I can tell about Openlaszlo is his lack of an efficient development tool. I saw the project of a plugin for eclipse is more or less abandonned, and that is a pity.
I hope that a dedicated tool, a kind of Visual OpenLaszlo, is part of your future projects !
Kind regards
Julien
March 7th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Hi Julien,
We are working on that. It’s sad that the Eclipse plug-in never really got the support we expected it to get. There are plans for a new OpenLaszlo IDE, but I cannot give you any more information right now.
I personally use Eclipse with an XML editor plug-in to code in LZX. That’s sufficient for me as I already know LZX. But for a beginner it would definitely help to have an IDE or better syntax support in an XML editor.
Regards,
Raju
March 7th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Ok, i look forward to discover the IDE
as far as I am concerned, I used notepad, so you see how much that would help me
bye
Julien
March 8th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Hi Raju!
After reading this post, it is clear to me why they choosed you as Community Manager!Very enthusiastic! My short experience with Laszlo(1 year) leaded to the Italian Community: we’ve already translated about half of OL docs into Italian and we’re organizing a conference where some of most important Italian IT companies will partecipate. This could lead (I’m sure it will) to a huge amplification of Laszlo phenomenon in my country. About the IDE, I’ve been talking with my colleagues about a meta-IDE: an IDE for Laszlo written in Laszlo! Imagine to drag and drop Laszlo components into the canvas and automatically obtain LZX in another panel. It’s not so complex if you just extend normal components with serialization methods and preset event behavior(i.e. in order to right-click on a component you dragged into the canvas and customize it). We’re also working to build a team that will contribute to the server development as soon as it will be possible.
We’re here cause we want OL Community to shine!
March 8th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Ciao Quirino!
That’s great news. Many Italians will be happy to have a translated version of the documentation.If you are organizing a conference where OpenLaszlo plays a big role I just have to come to Italy and attend the conference. I cannot promise anything but I’ll try my best to make it to Italy.
An OpenLaszlo IDE based on drag&drop OpenLaszlo components? Yes, David Temkin is a big fan of that idea. I think it’s an excellent approach. This would ensure that every update in the components would be immediately reflected in the IDE. And customized components wouldn’t pose a problem to the IDE.
We’d love to see a team in Italy contributing to the OpenLaszlo server. I can feel that the European OpenLaszlo community has entered a phase of rapid growths. The 4.0 version of OpenLaszlo will add even more momentum to that development.
Mi piacerebbe visitare l’Italia un giorno di questi!
Take care,
Raju
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:59 am
Hi Raju,
When most of the Development IDE’s are switching to become eclipse plugins and eclipse continues to grow as a development ide, why are u going against the trend and thinking of developing an independent ide for laszlo!!! The best way would be to continue the development of laszlo plugin for eclipse. This will also reduce the learning curve for developers and give them a consolidated development environment..
Also in order to get a more dynamic community support , the following things are very badly needed.
1. Eclipse based laszlo plugin: forget about demostrating your capability using laszlo. use the language used to develop the plugin.
2. A good book on laszlo development, best practices, etc: Just check out that the market is flooded with books on FLEX & ACTIONSCRIPT.
If the following things come late then flex will capture the developer community.
Thanks
Regards
Kumar