We are proud to announce the release of OpenLaszlo 4.1.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 is a major release bringing full support for both the DHTML/Ajax and the SWF/Flash platforms. It also includes over 800 bug fixes and a significantly improved documentation suite.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 has been fully-qualified across the following browser/platform combinations: Safari3/OSX, Firefox2/OSX, Internet Explorer 7/WinXP, Firefox 2/WinXP, and Firefox 2/Linux. We have tested the full suite of demos, samplers, and example applications with the requirement that, when possible, DHTML applications behave the same as their SWF counterparts.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 is now the recommended release for all developers on all platforms, and current users of OL 3.x and 4.0 should investigate upgrading to this new release.

Preliminary support for SWF9 is included in this release but has not been enabled in the developer console. If you want to try this new functionality, you can find more information on using the SWF9 support in the Release Notes (link to come).

For every release, we rely on the OpenLaszlo community to help ensure the quality of the platform release and to determine its future direction. To propose or participate in discussion of new features, see the Wiki. We encourage you to report any problems, and to make suggestions for enhancements, through our JIRA bug tracking system. We'd also like to hear from you on the mailing lists and in the forums.

Upgrading to OpenLaszlo 4.1

There are some changes to the OpenLaszlo release that may require changes to your code to work under release 4.1. Complete details and additional information on the differences between the SWF and DHTML runtimes can be found on the OpenLaszlo Wiki ( http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Runtime_Differences ).

The major change is that user classes are no longer defined as part of the global namespace. This gives OpenLaszlo better interoperability with other frameworks. In your application, user classes defined as:

<class name="Foo" .../>
<new foo(...)

will need to be changed to:

new lz.foo (...)

A script has been posted by Sebastian Wagner to help convert user classes. It can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/laszlo4converter/.

In addition, warnings may now appear if you are using deprecated syntax in your application. OpenLaszlo 4.1 includes a perl conversion script (convert_laszlo.pl) to help mitigate these warnings.

Dustin's Software Development Cogitations and Speculations: An OpenLaszlo RSS Reader Implementation:

In this blog entry, I demonstrate generation of a simple RSS Reader using OpenLaszlo. The world certainly doesn't need another RSS reader, so the purpose of this blog entry is to demonstrate some of the easy-to-use features of OpenLaszlo.

The RSS reader shown in this blog entry will focus on blogs hosted on Blogger (blogspot.com). There are two URLs one can use to access RSS feeds from blogs with the blogspot.com domain.

[....]

This OpenLaszlo example provide several observations about OpenLaszlo development. First, this example shows how easy it is to have OpenLaszlo access server-side XML resources using the tag:

request="true"
src="http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />

The dataset tag example shown above uses only three lines to associate a handle/name with the dataset called "blogRssFeed", instructs OpenLaszlo to initialize the dataset immediately, and provides the URL from which to access the data. I could have added the attribute type="http" to explicitly instruct OpenLaszlo that this data is obtained from an HTTP connection (rather than from a file), but using "http://" in the src attribute did essentially the same thing.

There's an article on OpenLaszlo in the July, 2008 issue of Linux Journal, Introducing OpenLaszlo by Paul Berry. You need to be a subscriber to either the paper or online versions to read it.

The kind people at Mark Logic have built a mailing list archive tool called MarkMail, which makes archiving and searching messages from mailing lists very easy. They've been nice enough to load the OpenLaszlo mailing lists into MarkMail, and you can access and search these archives at http://openlaszlo.markmail.org/. It's definitely worth checking out.

Just a note to warn people; if you're subscribed to this blog via a feed from feedburner, it's not updating. I've reset this blog to serve the feed directly for now while I figure this out.

Your subscription should be to:

http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/feed/

if it isn't, please update. Hopefully for most users, this will happen automatically but those of you who manually set up your RSS feeds might need to change it manually.

I'll fix this as soon as I can. The feedburner feed was set up by someone before my time, and nobody seems to have the feedburner account info, so I need to talk to them about regaining access.

chuq

I am pleased to announce the release of a major upgrade to our http://www.openlaszlo.org web site. This work has resulted in, not only a new design but also, a site that allows you to find what you're looking for with a simple click. For example; right from our new home page, you can follow the 5 quick steps to get started ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/getstarted ), know where to go for help ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/gethelp ), and how you can get involved ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/community ) because there is so much cool AJAX stuff going on.

You can now stay up to date on the latest news on what's happening in the community and online by subscribing to the OpenLaszlo news feeds via RSS ( forums & blog )

But we won't stop there either. We have lots more stuff planned - even a way for you to tell us about the cool OpenLaszlo applications you're working on so we can highlight them in the new showcase section as well as a Powered by OpenLaszlo program. This is just the start and we'll keep you posted as more new stuff happens.

I'm sure you all have ideas, too. I'd love to hear them...

Chuq Von Rospach
Webmaster, Laszlo Systems.
webmaster -at- laszlosystems.com

Andre Bargull and Josh Crowley did some work on the swf9 kernel, and the weather
demo now is compiling and running in swf9.

Stuff that is working here is XML data loading (SOLO, from 3rd party server), image loading, better mouse events,keyboard and tabbing events. Tab and shift-tab sequence through the tabsliders, and Enter key
works to submit the zipcode.

We're also preparing to check in a set of the flex compiler jar files, which will ship with the LPS distribution , so that people can compile to swf9 without needing to separately download and install the Flex compiler SDK.