The March edition of the OpenLaszlo <view> is available here:

http://www.openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView030910.pdf

Hi,
Check out the latest tips and tricks here:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView022210.pdf

OpenLaszlo 4.7.1 is now available at http://www.openlaszlo.org/download.

OpenLaszlo 4.7.1 is a bug fix release to OpenLaszlo 4.7, and contains 10 bug fixes and 2 new features. The fixes are in the areas of dynamically loading libraries in swf9/10, foreground and background interactions, re-enabling leak detectors for swf8, adding sensitivity attributes to microphone, and internal build changes. The new features are a new operator `subclassof` to test if one class is a subclass of another class (or mixin), and a new Bug information button in the debugger window. For details, see the JIRA report for Fixed Bugs in OpenLaszlo 4.7.1.

We strongly suggest that you refer to the Release Notes for OpenLaszlo 4.7, which was a significant release preceding OpenLaszlo 4.7.1.

OpenLaszlo continues to be grateful for the significant contributions by André Bargull and Raju Bitter. You guys are amazing - thank you! In addition, OpenLaszlo 4.7.1 contains a number of fixes that were made possible by the community contributors: Justin Hunt, Rami Ojares, and Thomas Deuling. Thanks for filing detailed bug reports, creating test apps, and helping us resolve these important bugs. We would also like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for your support in so many ways, like submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform.

Check out the latest edition of the OpenLaszlo View:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView021210.pdf

OpenLaszlo 4.7 is now available at http://www.openlaszlo.org/download. OpenLaszlo 4.7 is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes.

OpenLaszlo 4.7 is a bug fix release, containing more than 150 fixes. There are fixes to all runtimes: DHTML, SWF8, SWF9, and SWF10 which is unofficially supported in this release. Notable areas of improvement include: support for binary libraries, basic support for HTML 5 across runtimes, support for the Google Chrome plug-in, and <attribute> is now CSSable. In addition, significant improvement has been made to compilation times and memory footprint for SWF9 applications.

OpenLaszlo continues to be grateful for the significant contributions by Andre Bargull, Raju Bitter, and Sebastian Wagner. You guys are amazing - thank you! In addition, OpenLaszlo 4.7.0 contains a number of fixes that were made possible by the community contributors: Rami Ojares, Qian Jing, Stephane Mikaty, Wolfgang Stocher, Ryan Maslar, Wladyslaw Lorek Dacewicz, and Johannes Boesl. We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform.

The October 2009 edition of the OpenLaszlo <view> is available here:
http://openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView103109.pdf

Each month, we'll have a guest columnist and some interesting news from the OpenLaszlo project. If you have something you want to share, or a column you'd like to write, or questions for our columnists, send it along to contributions@openlaszlo.org.

We are pleased to announce the release of OpenLaslzo 4.6.1. It is available for download here. OpenLaszlo 4.6.1 is a bug fix release, containing more than 50 fixes primarily in the area of mouse events, context menus, and text. These fixes resulted from an architectural simplification of the underlying event and text mechanisms, which has the dual effect of both simplifying and stabilizing the DHTML code base. In addition, there were significant data and replication fixes thanks to André Bargull.

OpenLaszlo 4.6.1 also contains two significant improvements from community contributors. Sebastian Wagner extended the output of RPC with Gson as the marshaller for JSON. More details are provided in Bug LPP-8437, including how to write your own marshaller and how to get the Gson Factory to set your custom marshalling options. Raju Bitter added support for rotation in DHTML using FireFox 3.5, and fixed the default rotation origin to be top left or 0% for DHTML. See BUG LPP-8362 for more details. A complete list of bugs fixed in this release can be viewed here.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2 or higher, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.6.1.

We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform. Special thanks to André Bargull and Raju Bitter for their continued and amazing support of the project. We'd also like to thank the incredible engineering team at G.ho.st, who have worked with us as a sponsor to bring SWF9 and many other improvements to the community. Special recognition is also due to community contributors: Chad Lancour, Rami Ojares, Philip Romanik, and Jason Gratt.

For more details, please see the Release Notes.

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.3 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page. It is the recommended platform for all application development for the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. OpenLaszlo 4.3 is a major release, with almost 300 bugs fixed since OpenLaszlo 4.2 introduced the SWF9 runtime.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2.X, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.3.

To migrate your 4.0.X or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

This release also has a number of improvements, and significant advances in these areas:

• Audio/Video APIs are working well in this release. Videoplayer and videoview now show the first frame of the video by default when they appear, if a URL has been set. (You can control this behavior with new starttime API.) Live broadcast and recording APIs are working in both swf8 and swf9. We have also added a new Audio & Video Programming forum
• Incubator components have been updated to work with the 4.3 code base.
• A new documentation comments feature has been added, so that you can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs or feature requests should be filed in our JIRA bug tracking system as in previous releases.
• An improved debugger to deal with deep and circular objects when printing. The 4.3 release adds two new properties of Debug: printDepth:Number, default 8, limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object when printing it; inspectPrintDepth:Number, default 1, limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object that is a property of an object when inspecting. The debug printer will also detect circular objects (rather than causing a stack overflow), at small cost in overhead. When an object refers to itself (however indirectly), it will be printed just as its type and ID.

There is also an important change to the this behavior. In 4.2 and later, only declared attributes, i.e.: attribute name="myattr" … can be referenced lexically (without saying this.). The swf9 runtime will generate an error at compile time if you make a lexical reference to an undeclared attribute. For the swf8 and DHTML runtimes, the old behavior is supported but deprecated and may cause a compiler warning or error in future releases.

We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a better platform. We'd also like to thank the incredible engineering team at G.ho.st, who have worked with us as a sponsor to bring SWF9 and many other improvements to the community. Special thanks to André Bargull and Raju Bitter for their continued and amazing support of the project. Special recognition goes to community contributors: Sebastian Wagner, Justin Clift, Ryan Maslar, Sarah Allen, and Wolfgang Stöcher. And heartfelt thanks to Phil Romanik, Don Anderson, Josh Crowley, and Lou Iorio for their tireless efforts and significant contributions.

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 is the next fully-qualified release since OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.1, and is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2, no further work is needed. You should just start using OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2.

The 4.2.0.2 release includes more than 30 major bug fixes since 4.2.0.1; we have provided a link to the OpenLaszlo JIRA bug tracking system where you can view the details.

In addition to bug fixes, OpenLaszlo 4.2.0.2 contains two areas of improvement: documentation comments feature and compiler performance improvements:

The documentation comments feature adds a section at the end of every documentation page where you can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs or feature requests should be filed in our bug tracking system as in previous releases.

The compiler should be faster with 4.2.0.2 as compared to 4.2.0.1. The script cache is now disabled by default. Please note that setting the server logging level to DEBUG will slow down the compilation, due to the large amount of debugging information that is logged on the server. The DEBUG level logging is off by default.

For those of you who have 4.0.x or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose to take advantage of them.

As always, we appreciate your involvement and OpenLaszlo reaps the benefit of your expertise and commitment. We'd like to especially thank the following folks out there in the community who helped make this release by suggesting improvements, filing bugs, creating test cases, and contributing fixes: the team at IBM, Andre Bargull, Sebastian Wagner, Raju Bitter, Gilad Parann-Nissany, Ammar Sh. Tazami, Justin Clift, Mohammad ZeinEddin, Michael Jessup, and Nasser Najjar.

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.