We are pleased to announce the availability of OpenLaszlo 3.2. This release introduces a number of new features, many incubator contributions, improvements to the documentation, and contains valuable bug fixes. Many of the incubator contributions came from the Laszlo Mail team, who has shared some of the look-and-feel from their components. In addition, this release marks a milestone with significant contributions from the OpenLaszlo community - THANK YOU!

Some of the new features include:

• tags within rich text views
• MSAA-compatible accessibility
• Rich text editor palette (available in the incubator)
• Automated unit tests
• New and syntax
• Compiler performance improvements

The incubator has grown tremendously with OpenLaszlo 3.2 to include a rich text editor palette, many buttons, checkboxes, sliders, and radio buttons to help with the look-and-feel of your applications, form validators, compatibility functions for the W3 DOM API bindings for ECMAScript, drawview API enhancements including a cubic bezier implementation, and more. It is definitely worth a look - there is some really cool stuff in here!

In addition, some of the incubator contributions, like newcombobox, have been promoted to components. See the Release Notes for more information.

You can use JIRA to view a complete list of bugs and features that were addressed in OpenLaszlo 3.2.

We encourage you to get involved! Join the OpenLaszlo community and make a difference. We look forward to hearing from you whether in the mailing lists, the developer forums, or through JIRA our bug reporting system.

OpenLaszlo 3.2cr3, the latest community release of the 3.2 branch, is available for download. Since the last community release, there has been significant testing on this branch. Some of the recent changes include:

• Drawing api changes: LPP-1639 cubic bezier implementation (contributed by Oliver Steele), LPP-1640 CSS color string code (also contributed by Oliver Steele), and LPP-1588 changes to arc to make it match the WHATWG specification.
• More improvements to the Reference Manual
• Fix for the error when setting SWF8 as the runtime default (LPP-1623 contributed by Keiji Ono)
• Elimination of debug warnings in basewindow (LPP-1598)
• Many validator fixes: LPP-1642, LPP-1593, and LPP-1591
• XPATH fix to match attributes with "/" in them (LPP-737)
• LzKeys extensions and correction (LPP-1670, LPP-1671 contributed by Oliver Steele)

The complete list of fixes can be found in the SAGE milestone in JIRA here: http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP

Please take a moment to download this version, OpenLaszlo 3.2cr3, and report any problems or issues. As always, we encourage you to send us your feedback and contributions!

You may have noticed that the subversion log that's linked to from the download page is a year out of date. Well, so I did I, and I decided to do something about it. Browse on over to the OpenLaszlo Subversion log viewer, and you can see the most recent twenty changes, along with the friendly faces of the people who commited them.

Of course, the command line subversion tool works too:
svn log http://svn.openlaszlo.org/openlaszlo/trunk.

The OpenLaszlo Rails plugin makes it easy to use OpenLaszlo client-side applications with Rails. It includes generators and scaffolding for creating OpenLaszlo applications, connecting them to Rails REST controllers, and displaying them within Rails views.

For example, the following shell command will create a Rails model named Contact, a REST controller named ContactController, an OpenLaszlo application named applet, and a view named contact/applet.
[code]
> script/generate applet contact applet
[/code]

At this point the applet will automatically display records that it retrieves, via the controller, from the model.

h3. More Info

You can install the plugin in a rails application by using the Rails plugin script:
[code]
> script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/laszlo-plugin/tags/openlaszlo
[/code]

The "OpenLaszlo plugin project page":http://laszlo-plugin.rubyforge.org/ contains additional documentation.

h3. It's that simple!

In fact, here is all you need to type, from start to finish, in order to (1) install the OpenLaszlo plugin and its dependencies, (2) create a Rails application, (3) create an OpenLaszlo application that is configured to display rows from a database table, (4) create a view that holds the OpenLaszlo application, and (5) create a controller for the application to talk to (using REST). This assumes you've already installed Ruby, Rails, MySQL (or another database), and OpenLaszlo.
[code]
> gem install ropenlaszlo
> rails contacts
> cd contacts
# (update config/database.yaml with your database configuration settings here)
> script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/laszlo-plugin/tags/openlaszlo
> script/generate applet contact applet
> rake
> script/server
# open "http://localhost:3000/contacts/applet" in your browser
[/code]

Update: Changed the svn URL from install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/laszlo-plugin/trunk to install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/laszlo-plugin/tags/openlaszlo. The other URL still works, but may get you an untested version.

The "OpenLaszlo" module that was announced "a few days ago":http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2006/01/deploying-openlaszlo-applications-with-rake/ is now available as a Ruby gem. This means that installing it on your system is as simple as typing gem install ropenlaszlo — assuming you've already got Ruby and Rubygems.

This means it's easier than ever to write a build or deployment script for a site that includes OpenLaszlo applications. It also paves the way for integrating OpenLaszlo and Rails, as discussed here.

The new home page for the ROpenLaszlo gem is here.

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 3.1.1 was released today and is available at http://www.openlaszlo.org/download/ . This is a minor point release, but has some notable improvements:

Primarily, the documentation has been significantly improved. Many edits have been added; dead links and broken examples have been repaired; and a new chapter on the rich text component has been added to the Developer's Guide.

In addition, significant defects were corrected with the following components, which can be found in the incubator: newcombobox, gradientview, and draglib.

A list of the JIRA tasks completed for 3.1.1 can be found at:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=10140&styleName=Html&projectId=10020&Create=Create

We also wish to say thank you for your enthusiasm and ongoing involvement in the OpenLaszlo platform. All best wishes for 2006!

The OpenLaszlo Team

Adobe, Laszlo Systems and Nexaweb Technologies Honored by Roundarch for Contributions to Rich Internet Applications
Wednesday December 14, 2:00 pm ET

Roundarch, a user-centric Web design and technology services provider, today announced it has awarded its first annual Interactive Experience Awards to three recipients: David Mendels, senior vice president of the Enterprise and Developer Solutions Business Unit at Adobe; David Temkin, founder of Laszlo Systems; and Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb Technologies -- for their pioneering efforts in the rich internet application (RIA) space. The Roundarch Interactive Experience Awards are given to companies that best represent the advancement of Web experiences through the integration of user-centric design and advanced technology.

"We singled out these three companies because each is breaking ground in the RIA space," said Jeff Maling, President and Chief Experience Officer at Roundarch. "These three companies are tackling traditional Web challenges -- such as Webmail, on-line commerce and on-line banking -- and transforming them into richer, more interactive and ultimately more profitable on-line experiences. They are also defining new uses for the Web by using rich internet technology to increase customer profitability and improve employee productivity."

Congratulations to David, and to the OpenLaszlo and Laszlo Mail teams!

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 3.1 is available for download. We are excited about the application development possibilities with all of the new features and performance improvements in this release. We wish to thank all of the community members who contributed code, submitted bug fixes, tested the incremental versions, and provided feedback.

Here are the important links:
• DOWNLOADS: http://www.openlaszlo.org/download
• RELEASE NOTES: http://www.openlaszlo.org/download/binaries/3.1/release-notes.html
• IDE4LASZLO: http://eclipse.org/laszlo

You can also keep up with the latest features and fixes in the code by downloading the nightly builds: http://www.openlaszlo.org/download/

OpenLaszlo 3.1 provides a significant number of new features, including a rich text class, new components: hbox, vbox, and image, Flash 8 file generation, local datasets, browser history integration: the default HTML wrappers now include support for browser history and setcanvasAttribute(), an XMLHttpRequest ("AJAX") API, a setcanvasAttribute() Javascript function that can optionally add browser history events, applications now default to window size, a "View source" menu item, a charting and graphing components (beta), a tutorial introduction to Drawview, version detection, developer console enhancements, a global "hand cursor" parameter, a backtrace facility and other improvements in the debugger, changes to the splash screen such that it now takes percentages, and new code in the incubator.

There are also numerous bug fixes, and performance improvements. To view the complete list, see JIRA: http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10020&fixfor=10085

You can now read, search, and subscribe to the OpenLaszlo mailing lists on the GMame mailing list gateway. As of October, all three OpenLaszlo mailing lists – laszlo-user, laszlo-dev, and laszlo-announce – are mirrored on GMame.

(more...)

Laszlo Systems, the sponsor of the OpenLaszlo project, launched a hosted preview of the Laszlo Mail application today. We encourage you to try it out at http://www.laszlomail.com, to tell your friends, and to send the developers your feedback.

This is an excellent example of the kind of application that can be built using the OpenLaszlo platform.  We congratulate the Laszlo Mail team on this exciting new application.  As Jonathan Boutelle says : " It feels like a candy-coated swiss army knife, an appealing mix of aesthetics and pragmatic design."

You can read about some of the best practices and performance optimizations that the Laszlo Mail team (and others!) have contributed, on the OpenLaszlo wiki.

From the product page:

Laszlo Mail puts a high-polish interface on Web mail with features and performance that outshine others - consistently in any browser. The design center of Laszlo Mail focuses on high quality of user experience where the application uses dynamic layout and animation changes to help users to stay oriented within application interfaces and efficiently complete email tasks.