We are pleased to pass along this announcement from Sebastian Wagner:

Hi,

I would like to announce that we have release OpenMeetings in Version 1.8, based on the OpenLaszlo framework
I think it can be called quite full-featured: http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/wiki/ChangeLog
Although we still try to improve and permanently add new features.

We are also applying for the Apache Incubator: http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenmeetingsProposal
And after a while we have now an Apache Champion and enough Mentors from the Foundation to move on to bring OpenMeetings into the Apache Incubator. So if things work well that could become the first OpenLaszlo powered project at the Apache Foundation!

Sebastian
--
Sebastian Wagner
http://www.webbase-design.de
http://openmeetings.googlecode.com
http://www.wagner-sebastian.com
seba.wagner@gmail.com

It seems that somewhere we should mark the event of the 10,000th JIRA issue being filed yesterday. That's a lot of issues, a lot of new features, and a lot of improvements. It also represents a lot of fixes, contributions, and hard work. What a ride!

I still remember when we moved to JIRA in 2005. We were just getting ready to release OpenLaszlo 3.0. In fact, we were doing our second and final beta release in advance of OpenLaszlo 3.0. The very first JIRA task we filed was to implement dynamic libraries (LPP-1), followed by the implementation of SOLO mode (LPP-2) or serverless deployment as we called it back then. We've come so far!

From then until now, over 6 years have passed and OpenLaszlo has been fortunate to have the expertise and contributions of so many talented developers and contributors. To all of you out there that have supported OpenLaszlo and come along for the ride - thank you!

And now, it's onward to HTML5... and another 10,000.

Newest Addition to Showcase Applications: OpenMeetings

OpenMeetings is a free browser-based software that allows you to
instantly set up a conference in the Web. You can use your microphone
or webcam, share documents on a white board, share your screen or
record meetings. It is available as hosted service or you download and
install a package on your server with no limitations in usage or
users.

Check it out at http://www.openmeetings.de

We've been updating the OpenLaszlo Showcase with new applications submitted by OpenLaszlo users (see http://www.openlaszlo.org/showcase). We've added three new applications, and if you haven't already seen them, they are definitely worth a look:

PROTOGYM: an online personal training and exercise management solution developed in OpenLaszlo featuring intelligent automatic workout generation, historical data tracking and trending, integrated equipment inventories, and detailed videos and instructions for over 600 exercises.

ISCOPE: a web developing agency located in Osnabrück, Germany using OpenLaszlo for small widgets, tool development, and websites, such as a fully functional ERP/Enterprise Resource Management that is also modular and multilingual.

DCM-A: a company specializing in medical informatics, created a medical images viewer in OpenLaszlo that conforms to the DICOM protocol and works in web environments, as well as on mobile or desktop devices.

Check out the latest scoop in the April 14th edition of the OpenLaszlo <view>:

http://www.openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView041410.pdf

Check out the latest installment of the OpenLaszlo :
http://www.openlaszlo.org/misc/OpenLaszloView032910.pdf

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 4.2.0.2 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.

Matt Asay of Alfresco announced in his CNet blog that the Thalia application framework built as an open source software by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Information Services & Technology won an InfoWorld award. Here's a description of Thalia from the InfoWorld website:

MIT's Information Services and Technology group developed Thalia, an application framework for the management of image and other digital media. To ensure the product's success, MIT partnered with Questcon Technologies, a QA and test specialty firm, to validate the application before releasing to MIT's departments. Thalia comprises a rich Web client and the Image Management Engine, which provides a framework of distinct, reusable components via its REST-style APIs. Thalia's Web client was built using OpenLaszlo and is compiled to create a Flash interface. Thalia's back end comprises Java servlets exposed as REST Web services, and it interfaces with the Alfresco open source ECM (enterprise content management) system. The framework allows MIT departments to upload, organize, tag, present, discuss, and search multimedia content.

OpenLaszlo can perfectly be used to improve the presentation layer of web applications, connecting to many of the existing open source CMS, webapplication development frameworks and digital content repositories. As long as the back-end system provides web services to connect to the integration of an OpenLaszlo rich Internet application client with the back-end doesn't pose any problems, providing a superb user experience across runtimes like DHTML/Ajax and Flash.

Congratulations to the whole Thalia team! It's always inspiring to see what you are building with our technology.