This week we had the chance to present OpenLaszlo at WebappsCon in Seoul. WebappsCon is a one day conference with focus on the newest technical internet trends. The conference was held at COEX (Convention & Exhibition Center) in Kangnam (southern Seoul). More than 1,000 people attended the conference, only very few people had ever heard of OpenLaszlo.

I did a one hour presentation of OpenLaszlo technology, attended by around 200 people. The presentation was held in Korean, which is a huge advantage in Korea, as it's still hard for many Koreans to fully understand a presentation held in English. After lunch I took part in a panel discussion on the future of RIA with two Koreans, one working for Microsoft Korea representing Silverlight technology, the other one an Adobe Flex specialist. The panel discussion was held in front of the full audience of more than 1,000 conference attendees, giving us the chance to make OpenLaszlo technology a lot more visible in a country, which features some of the most advanced Flash applications deployed.

I didn't have a chance to contact the company working on the PCAnn application before my trip to Korea. PCAnn is the first OpenLaszlo application deployed in Korea we know off right now (if there are others, please report them to us!). But when I was approached by a number of Koreans right after the OpenLaszlo presentation, one of them was the Mun-sik Kang, the CEO of Digital Trend Inc.. PCAnn is one of the projects Digital Trend is working on right now. Mun-sik told me that he is very satisfied with OpenLaszlo and is planning to use OpenLaszlo in some of his future projects. Here's a picture of Mun-sik and me at the conference. It was great to meet you, Mun-sik! Good luck with OpenLaszlo for your future projects.

It's always a nice surprise to meet the people behind the applications built with our technology. If you have been building applications with OpenLaszlo and members of the OpenLaszlo team or Laszlo System are around, please contact us and tell us about the work you have been doing.

There's one person among the many supportive Koreans which I want to mention again: Yun-Seok Chan (Channy), the leader of the Korean Firefox team, a huge supporter of the open source idea and a great person. Without Channy I wouldn't have been a the conference, and he even made it possible for us to do OpenLaszlo presentations at Daum, the company he's working for and Naver/NHN. Thank you, Channy, this is a great way to support the OpenLaszlo project!

Channy is leading a hard fight in South Korea to get at least one percent of the Korean internet users to switch to Firefox, right now the rate is still below one percent. You wonder what the small Firefox team lead by Channy can do against the huge power of Internet Explorer and tons of ActiveX plugins? Read this great article on how Naver and Daum both support Firefox, and visit MozillaZine Korea for more information on this process.

Max Carlson, co-founder and lead run-time architect at Laszlo Systems, in an interview with TheServerSide.com about OpenLaszlo 4.0 and how it helps developers to write and deploy rich internet applications (RIAs) targetting both the Flash run-time and AJAX from the same source.

Want to know about the "secret IRC channel" Max mentions? Well, it's no secret any more. Visit us at irc://irc.freenode.org/#laszlo (I hope the OpenLaszlo team won't kill me for this...).

Java.net published a podcast on Project Orbit with Laszlo Systems founder Max Carlson and Sun senior staff engineer Hinkmond Wong. Project Orbit is the Sun Java ME viewer for Laszlo DHTML applications on set-top boxes and smart cell phones.

In the last six months we've seen increasing interest in OpenLaszlo by the Korean web community. I've been trying to reach out to the Korean open source community, always hoping that the initial interest in OpenLaszlo would soon result in the first Korean OpenLaszlo applications showing up. Last month we heard the news about the start of an open beta of PCAnn.co.kr. Now we have more good news for everyone in Korea interested in the OpenLaszlo project and Laszlo Systems: I'll be presenting OpenLaszlo at the Web Applications Conference on June 21st in Seoul, South Korea. There will be a one hour presentation of OpenLaszlo from 11:30am - 12:30pm as part of workshop 102 (Future of rich Internet applications). And I'll be part of the panel discussion on the future of rich Internet applications from 2:30pm - 3:10pm.

We want to thank Channy Yun of Daum Communications for the invitation to WebAppsCon. Channy is working as a Technology Evangelist, is one of the leaders of the Korean Mozilla team and apparently a great supporter of open source projects, like OpenLaszlo. I'm looking forward to meeting Channy, the Korean web community and companies interested in OpenLaszlo.

Long-standing OpenLaszlo community member Sebastian Wagner released a new open source project today named openmeetings. It's a video conferencing and group collaboration application, built using OpenLaszlo's new streaming media support and the open source media server Red5.

This sort of project is great for the OpenLaszlo community, and we wish Sebastian good fortune and many collaborators with this project!

Our dear friends in Italy will officially launch the first Italian OpenLaszlo community on April 12th 2007. There will be a conference held on communities as the main engine for the open-source development at the University of Sannio

The event will be a way to focus on potential and advantages of a development method like open-source which gained the attention of organizations who put quality assurance at the center of any software project.
...
LaszloItalia will illustrate the main features of the OpenLaszlo framework and what's new in the last release. Then we will present the objectives of the community and the projects we will work on in next months.

Thanks to the organizing team for your efforts in spreading the word about OpenLaszlo technology. Your work will lead to further OpenLaszlo adoption in Italy and Europe.

There have been several questions lately about whether to adopt OL4 for various projects, so we wrote up these informal guidelines.

There are currently three "official" releases of OpenLaszlo: 3.3.3, 3.4.0, and 4.0.0. The 3.3.3 release was the last 3.x release to receive a full qualification pass. 3.4.0 went out to support Webtop 1.0 and was only qualified for use with that Laszlo Systems product. 4.0.0 is the multi-runtime release developed under the code name "Legals."

Our current recommendation is that in the short term, 3.3.3 is your best bet for deployment of production-quality OpenLaszlo applications. 3.3.3 was fully qualified at the time of release, it is stable, it's characteristics are best known of any current release.

3.4.0 contains just one new production-ready feature -- streaming Audio/Video, also available in 4.0 -- so it would be a good choice only if you had a short-term need for that particular feature.

We only recommend 4.0 today if you are beginning a longer product cycle, because OL4 is no different from any other x.0.0 release -- it contains big, exciting new features, but most likely has rough edges. Those rough edges will be polished off soon enough, at which point you absolutely will want to be on OL4.

(By the way, if you are actively working in 4.0, you might consider developing against the latest build from our 4.0.x development branch, http://svn.openlaszlo.org/openlaszlo/branches/4.0. It is from this branch that we will be releasing 4.0.1 and its successors. Currently, branches/4.0 contains perhaps a dozen fixes to problems that were reported against 4.0.0.)

As for the practical porting questions, OL4 on Flash is not bug-for-bug compatible with 3.x, so you will find some porting issues which will require code changes. Many of these are mentioned in the OL4 release notes (http://download.openlaszlo.org/4.0.0/release-notes.html), and others have been discussed in the mailing lists (http://www.openlaszlo.org/lists) and forum (http://forum.openlaszlo.org).

OL4 in DHTML is a somewhat different beast, since the dialects of JavaScript used in the various browsers are generally stricter than ActionScript. For example, null accesses are not rewarded with a token 'null' reply as in ActionScript, but rather cause the browser to abort the running script. However, OL4's debugging support is noticeably better than 3.x's, and tools like Firebug for FireFox are fantastic for debugging OL code and likely to get even better in the future.

Functionally, just about everything that was available in 3.3.3 is available in both DHTML and Flash in 4.0.0. This includes XML-RPC and drawview. A number of incubator components are not yet available (like the rich text editor, which we do intend to port). And we weren't able to squeeze SOAP access in DHTML into our final release, but it will be coming soon. Again, more details are available in the release notes.

Monster.com, the biggest and most comprehensive internet job search engine on the web started a public beta for the new OpenLaszlo based job search application. The development team announced the the public beta in the OpenLaszlo forums.

It's exciting to see another adoption of OpenLaszlo technology by a market leader in the internet industry. At startup, the application shows a random live feed of jobs as they are coming into the system. The rich filtering options will make it a lot easier for anyone to filter out the jobs you don't want, saving you a lot of time in the process.

I remember that I was playing around with the German version of Monster.com about two years ago. I thought to myself: "With OpenLaszlo the searchs' functionality would be a lot better." Well, here we go! Congratulations to the development team at Monster for taking the application to a public beta. We can't wait to see the application step out of the beta phase. Great job!

OpenLaszlo community in South Korea: 오픈��로 한국� �착하다! 아�� 한국� 오픈��로 아는 분들� 많� 없겠지만 �제 한국 오픈��로 커뮤니티를 위한 다� 카페가 (Daum Cafe) �겼다. 오픈��로 카페�서 만나는 ��로팬들� 빨리 많아지기를 기대해 본다. �본�서� 중국�서� 오픈��로 쓰는 사람� 숫�는 벌� 많다! �경 오픈��로 �럽� 참�하는 사람들� 50명입니다. Let's make OpenLaszlo a success in Korea, too!

For everyone who doesn't know Korean. There's a new website for the Korean OpenLaszlo community. Visit the Daum Café for the Korean OpenLaszlo Community (sorry, everything in Korean). Daum is one of the major internet companies in Korea.

Thanks to Hayoung for setting up the Café. Let's see if OpenLaszlo will be as successful in Korea as it already is in Japan and China.

P.S. If you know Korean and want to register from outside Korea for the Daum Café, that's possible. Just register with Daum and enter your international phone number. The Daum server will call you and pass a secret code in Korean to you. Enter that code into the registration form on their website and you can join the Café.

As I announced in my previous blog posts we plan to feature community members from around the world using OpenLaszlo technology. The name Laszlo is of Hungarian origin. Peter Andrea, a graphic designer who was a co-founder of Laszlo Systems, had a cat named Laszlo, in honor of the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy. Given the fact that Laszlo Systems carries a Hungarian name it's only appropriate to start with a community member from Hungary. Well, his name is not László, let him introduce himself:

Marcell Kiss-Toth, Hungarian OpenLaszlo addict
I’m 18 years old and I live in Tiszaújváros, Hungary. I started my career in the field of information technology in 2000 when I was in the junior classes of primary school. In august I had a chance to meet a really innovate company and their great leaders - the SandMark Solutions. Their main tool in developing Web 2.0 applications is the open-source OpenLaszlo. I was amazed at its flexibility and powerfulness. Currently I’m the community manager of SandMark Solutions. You'll find more info about me on my website www.kiss-toth.hu.

How did you get in contact with OpenLaszlo technology?
I was working with Adobe Flex when people from SandMark Solutions brought OpenLaszlo to my attention.

What was your first impression when you saw OpenLaszlo and OpenLaszlo applications?
I believed those were the next generation of web applications. They give you an unforgettable breakthrough user experience.

OpenLaszlo applications are programmed in the LZX language, a mixture of JavaScript, XML and xPath. What are the advantages of using LZX and tags compared to directly scripting in JavaScript?
Generally tags are used to create JavaScript objects, while directly scripting is used to manipulate objects created by tags. Theoretically anything that can be done with a tag can be done by directly scripting too, and vice versa. Usually you use tags to make the layout and JavaScript to do the programming.

Do you have a favourite OpenLaszlo application which shows bests the features of the technology?
My favourite one is the LaszloMail. It’s fascinating to see that it gives you all the same features as a desktop mail client. It’s fun and easy to use. ?

Did you build and any applications which are online right now? Or maybe applications running on intranets, which are not accessible to the public?
The only application that is currently available to the public was made for a French competition at school. I had a Sunday afternoon for it, you may check it out on www.mactheguy.com/Les_Clochards. I’m working on a new project now however it’s not public yet.

How does OpenLaszlo compare with other technologies, like Flex or AJAX toolkits?
OpenLaszlo has the advantage that you don’t need anything to run an OpenLaszlo application but a Flash player. Because of this you surely won’t have any platform compatibility problems. It’s hard to compare OpenLaszlo with Flex as OpenLaszlo is not just about compiling LZX code into Flash but it also makes possible to compile your code into DHTML or other runtimes which will be available in the future.

By the end of the Q1/2007 the OpenLaszlo team will release the 4.0 version of OpenLaszlo. With the 4.0 version developers can chose between two different runtimes for OpenLaszlo applications: Flash and DHTML! Have you tried the beta release of 4.0 and what is your experience with the 4.0 version?
Yes, it rocks! It’s so good to see that it’s enough to write your applications using one technology (OpenLaszlo) and then you can choose whether to use this or that runtime according to your needs.

As an open source project we need an active and supportive community. Are you involved in any community efforts around OpenLaszlo or do you plan to start a user group?

2 weeks ago we started an OpenLaszlo User Group (HOPLAA – Hungarian OpenLaszlo Addicts) with the help of SandMark Solutions, one of the leading Hungarian RIA developer companies. We have already had our first community meeting in Budapest. We are planning to organise more and looking forward to having a great community with OpenLaszlo fans. Our website will be online soon.

Where would you personally like to see OpenLaszlo in a year from now? Which parts of the technology should be improved, which runtimes should be added to the platform (Flash Lite, Java Micro Edition, Windows Presentation Foundation)? Do you any suggestions?

For me it’s going to be an interesting time when I could see OpenLaszlo applications running on all the cell phones around me and on the television in the living room. And you could turn your OpenLaszlo application into a Windows Sidebar gadget with the help of Windows Presentation Foundation.

There’s a great team of developers working hard to make the OpenLaszlo platform such a cool technology, answering questions for free in the mailing lists and forums. And there are people working hard every day at Laszlo Systems making money, part of which is invested into the OpenLaszlo technology. Is there anything you would like tell those people here?

I appreciate their work and I would say thank you for their generous help. OpenLaszlo has a fascinating future, keep doing well!

Marcell, thank you for the interview. I wish you good luck in building up an active Hungarian OpenLaszlo community. I'm looking forward ot meeting you at the Hungarian Web Conference 2007 in Budapest on March 31st. And to all you OpenLaszlo developers in Hungary: let's have an all Hungarian OpenLaszlo user group meeting at the end of March in Budapest. Please contact Marcell for more information. You'll find his contact information in his weblog.