04.02.07
Guidance on OL4 adoption
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.
Aaron said,
April 3, 2007 at 8:16 am
This was very informative, but I’d like to have “long-term” and “short-term” projects defined.
We’ve used 3.x of OL successfully and were very pleased but after using OL4 for one day specifically for DHTML, I can’t view 4.0 as anything but beta unfortunately and I wouldn’t label it a x.0.0 release. In my limited testing, things seemed to work fine in FF but IE7 seemed to have some basic issues. Like below (doesn’t work because of valign):
I am looking forward to the next release however because I think OL4 has the best potential compared to other products out there.
jgrandy said,
April 4, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Sure, we are doing a planning round now (shipping OL4 was pretty all-consuming), and will have details for you by the end of April.
I’ll point out that IE is a very difficult browser to fully support given the scope of OL4’s capabilities. We are aware that our IE support falls short of that for other browsers, and are working hard (subject to the peculiarities of that browser) to address them.
jim
OpenLaszlo Community Germany · OpenLaszlo Version 4.0.2 Release said,
May 18, 2007 at 7:33 pm
[…] Nach dem offiziellen Release der 4.0.2 Version von OpenLaszlo steht der erste Minor Release der neuen OpenLaszlo Version. Eine Vielzahl an Bugs wurde behoben und einige neue Features implementiert (z.B. der HTML Tag innerhalb von LZX). Auch wenn die 4.0.2er Version schon erhebliche Verbesserungen enthält, ist sie noch nicht für den Produktionsbetrieb freigegeben (hier mehr zu den Gründen). […]