OpenLaszlo 4.2alpha is the first build in the SWF9 support release path. This release provides alpha-level support for SWF9 features:

• LZPIX, Weather and Component Sampler work with SWF9
• SWF9 installation packaged with Flex compiler
• databinding and basic replication
• "implicit this" support
• Text, fonts, scrolling and selection APIs
• Keyboard and mouse events
• Multi-frame resource support
• Image loading
• Resource Stretching
• Script Tag Support
• XML-RPC support

This is a limited release inteded only for initial porting and testing of SWF9 applications. See the Release Notes for more details.

To download this release, please visit the OpenLaszlo Download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 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 4.1.1 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 4.1.1 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.

OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 fixes many bugs in the initial 4.1.0 release. A list of the bugs fixed in OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 and details about each can be found here: Fixed bugs in 4.1.1

We recommend that all users who downloaded OpenLaszlo 4.1.0 upgrade to release 4.1.1.

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

Please be aware of the following known issue in OpenLaszlo 4.1.1:

LPP-6633: For SWF9 development on Unix, you will need to manually chmod 755 all the binaries in WEB-INF/server/bin/ before you can compile. This is true for both the .war and .gz distributions.

We just had to share this with you. Last night, we passed a major milestone in the history of the OpenLaszlo project. Yesterday, we passed the 500,000 copies of downloaded. Half a million.

That's a big number. And it's going to continue to grow because you folks are making OpenLaszlo a great environment to build great things in.

Congrats to the OpenLaszlo team -- and everyone involved in OpenLaszlo -- for making OpenLaszlo what it is today.

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

This week will feature two OpenLaszlo community events in Europe: the initial meeting of the OpenLaszlo User Group in Zurich, Switzerland - and the European OpenLaszlo Community Meeting in Amsterdam. We'll meet in Zurich on Tuesday, Nov 13 at the Catsoft.ch office space (thanks to Arthur Heftli and Catsoft for coming up with the idea for a meeting). If you plan to attend the meeting please enter your name into the list on the meeting page in the OpenLaszlo Europe Google Group.

I've received a lot of support from Marc de Koos of XB in organizing the European OpenLaszlo Community Meeting in Amsterdam, Nov 16-18. Thank you Marc for your help and XB's generosity. XB is the first official Laszlo Partner in Europe, so I'm very excited to see that they are so supportive when it comes to the OpenLaszlo community.

We are still looking for community members interested in joining us in Amsterdam, so if you want to meet with the leading OpenLaszlo developers in Europe put your name on the list. There will be socializing, a whole day with presentations around OpenLaszlo, OpenLaszlo adoption in Europe and community discussions around the OpenLaszlo technology. On Sunday you'll have the chance to participate in coding sessions, so it's a good idea to bring your notebooks with you. XB offered their office space for Saturday and Sunday, so we'll have a conference room, wifi and enough seats for everyone participating in the coding sessions on Sunday.

If you have any questions around the European OpenLaszlo Community Meeting, please post them in the Google Group. And don't miss the socializing and schmoozing on Friday evening, 7pm at De Kroon restaurant.

We are happy to announce the first European OpenLaszlo meeting which will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands on November 16-18 2007. We invite all developer interested in OpenLaszlo or already working with OpenLaszlo in Europe and around the world to join us for this meeting.

All information around the meeting can be found in the OpenLaszlo Europe group at groups.google.com/group/openlaszlo-europe. If you plan to attend the meeting, please add your name to this page (you need to join the OpenLaszlo Europe group to make changes to the page).

On Saturday there will be room for presentations, and hand-on sessions with LZX coding will held on Sunday. Looking for socializing and schmoozing? Amsterdam will offer us enough opportunities to go out and have some fun on Friday and Saturday evening. If you have any questions around the OpenLaszlo community meeting, just post them in the OpenLaszlo Europe Google group. I'm really looking foward to meeting many of our community members in Amsterdam. Van harte welkom!

We are thrilled to announce that OpenLaszlo has won InfoWorld’s BOSSIE award, which selects “the best of open source software for the enterprise.� OpenLaszlo has been named "Best of Open Source Software" within the Software category.

OpenLaszlo - formerlery known as the Laszlo Presentation Server - was open sourced in October 2004 by Laszlo, the creator of the OpenLaszlo technology. What was considered to be a risky move by outsiders back then might now be viewed as one of the best closed-to-open success stories, according to Infoworld.

“Some products that were once exclusively commercial got religion, or had it thrust upon them, and re-emerged as open source. OpenLaszlo, a multi-platform rich Web application solution, may be the best closed-to-open success story. Laszlo Systems’ open source conversion unquestionably put the company in the right place at the right time, adding orders of magnitude to its installed base and even setting the stage for Adobe’s incremental opening of its crown jewel Flash and Flex technologies.�
Full article

The ever growing global OpenLaszlo community covering five continents gives proof not only to the technical maturity of OpenLaszlo as a platform but to the acceptance of OpenLaszlo as a true open source technology.

The choice in RIAs comes down to Adobe Flex and OpenLaszlo, and several factors tip the scales toward OpenLaszlo. Flex is still not fully operating as an open source project, and lacks the kind of community at OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo skills are easy to find, and its code base is stable, mature, and tested.

The OpenLaszlo team and Laszlo Systems want to thank our community members at this point. There has been an incredibly positive feedback since 2004, a lot of understanding when things took a bit longer than we thought and and much, much positive energy flowing around OpenLaszlo. The BOSSIE award goes not only to Laszlo and the OpenLaszlo team but to all friends, contributors, committers and developers involved with the OpenLaszlo project.

The idea of open source and an open development process appeals to many people in a world dominated by huge corporations and their products. But our success wouldn't be possible without the effort of everyone working at Laszlo embracing the idea of an open source RIA platform. Without the commercial success story of Laszlo there would be no OpenLaszlo success story.

OpenLaszlo 4.0.3 was released to the web today. This is a minor release resolving more than 70 issues reported against OpenLaszlo 4.0.2. Download it here or play with it here (flash runtime) or here here (dhtml runtime).

Full details, including a list of fixed bugs, are available in the Release Notes.

Many of the issues addressed in this release were reported by the OpenLaszlo community, and some of the fixes were contributed by the community. Thanks to everyone who took the time to try out OL4 in SWF or DHTML and report your experiences to the mailing list or forum, and a particularly warm thanks to those of you who filed bugs. This release also has several known bugs in IE7/DHTML, which were discovered just as we were calling the release:

• Views clip their contents when opacity changed in IE7 DHTML This an issue with the IE7 renderer. The workaround is to not set the width/height of the container that has alpha (so the view system can resize it to its contents) or set the width/height to be bigger than its contents. See the JIRA bug comments for an example of this workaround, and this msdn article.
• LPP-4242 Controls go to disabled state when outer view opacity set in IE7 DHTML
• LPP-4244 Mouse handling busted in IE7 DHTML

We have fixes in hand for these bugs, which you can get in the legals nightly builds starting at r5785.

Note that while quality continues to improve, we do not recommend 4.0.3 for use in production environments yet, in part due to the known issues listed above. Release 4.1 is the planned milestone at which we will recommend upgrading production deployments from 3.x.

The folks at Sun have been doing a tremendous job getting projects open sourced and released to the community. I'm pleased to announce that Project Orbit has been released by Sun, and is available here:
https://orbit.dev.java.net/

svn repository is here: https://orbit.dev.java.net/source/browse/orbit/

Project Orbit is another runtime for Laszlo that takes the DHTML runtime output and allows it to run in Java ME by emulating the browser DOM. From the main page: 'Project Orbit is the Sun Java ME viewer of Laszlo content. It is a Java ME CDC/Personal Basis application that uses the Rhino engine to run LZX programming language Web 2.0 (AJAX style) applications.'

If you'd like to learn more, I'll be speaking with Hinkmond Wong at JavaOne in San Francisco today at 4:10pm - sorry about the short notice!

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit here - integration with the OpenLaszlo developer's console (a Java radio button), and tighter integration with the OpenLaszlo compiler come to mind. This is a community effort - Sun and OpenLaszlo are relying on folks to pitch in and help move the project forward. If you're looking to contribute to a very cool, forward looking project, here's your chance!