Our dear friends in Italy will officially launch the first Italian OpenLaszlo community on April 12th 2007. There will be a conference held on communities as the main engine for the open-source development at the University of Sannio

The event will be a way to focus on potential and advantages of a development method like open-source which gained the attention of organizations who put quality assurance at the center of any software project.
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LaszloItalia will illustrate the main features of the OpenLaszlo framework and what's new in the last release. Then we will present the objectives of the community and the projects we will work on in next months.

Thanks to the organizing team for your efforts in spreading the word about OpenLaszlo technology. Your work will lead to further OpenLaszlo adoption in Italy and Europe.

There have been several questions lately about whether to adopt OL4 for various projects, so we wrote up these informal guidelines.

There are currently three "official" releases of OpenLaszlo: 3.3.3, 3.4.0, and 4.0.0. The 3.3.3 release was the last 3.x release to receive a full qualification pass. 3.4.0 went out to support Webtop 1.0 and was only qualified for use with that Laszlo Systems product. 4.0.0 is the multi-runtime release developed under the code name "Legals."

Our current recommendation is that in the short term, 3.3.3 is your best bet for deployment of production-quality OpenLaszlo applications. 3.3.3 was fully qualified at the time of release, it is stable, it's characteristics are best known of any current release.

3.4.0 contains just one new production-ready feature -- streaming Audio/Video, also available in 4.0 -- so it would be a good choice only if you had a short-term need for that particular feature.

We only recommend 4.0 today if you are beginning a longer product cycle, because OL4 is no different from any other x.0.0 release -- it contains big, exciting new features, but most likely has rough edges. Those rough edges will be polished off soon enough, at which point you absolutely will want to be on OL4.

(By the way, if you are actively working in 4.0, you might consider developing against the latest build from our 4.0.x development branch, http://svn.openlaszlo.org/openlaszlo/branches/4.0. It is from this branch that we will be releasing 4.0.1 and its successors. Currently, branches/4.0 contains perhaps a dozen fixes to problems that were reported against 4.0.0.)

As for the practical porting questions, OL4 on Flash is not bug-for-bug compatible with 3.x, so you will find some porting issues which will require code changes. Many of these are mentioned in the OL4 release notes (http://download.openlaszlo.org/4.0.0/release-notes.html), and others have been discussed in the mailing lists (http://www.openlaszlo.org/lists) and forum (http://forum.openlaszlo.org).

OL4 in DHTML is a somewhat different beast, since the dialects of JavaScript used in the various browsers are generally stricter than ActionScript. For example, null accesses are not rewarded with a token 'null' reply as in ActionScript, but rather cause the browser to abort the running script. However, OL4's debugging support is noticeably better than 3.x's, and tools like Firebug for FireFox are fantastic for debugging OL code and likely to get even better in the future.

Functionally, just about everything that was available in 3.3.3 is available in both DHTML and Flash in 4.0.0. This includes XML-RPC and drawview. A number of incubator components are not yet available (like the rich text editor, which we do intend to port). And we weren't able to squeeze SOAP access in DHTML into our final release, but it will be coming soon. Again, more details are available in the release notes.