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

Check out this in-depth article about OpenLaszlo:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-openlaszlo/

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.

Google Maps in OpenLaszlo:

I wanted an example that:

* Embedded Google maps in a clean, developer-friendly way.
* Was full-featured (allowed a user to search for an address, and add a marker there).
* Passed information (such as where to add a marker) from the OpenLaszlo application to the map component.
* Passed information (such as the address of the marker that a user clicked) from the map to an object in the OpenLaszlo namespace.

Note that the Google Maps geocoding service is Flash-specific. Even though it passes XML back to the client, you need to use Google’s Flash-based APIs to call it. I didn’t want to do this; I wanted my example to perform the search in OpenLaszlo, and pass instructions to the map component. So I used Yahoo Maps’ excellent geocoding service.

Here are the instructions on how to do this

A great article by Antun on embedding Gogle maps in OpenLaszlo.

Nice thing is that this looks to work well for a project I'm looking at doing as well. Thanks, Antun!

CSS in OpenLaszlo:

It’s been over a month since my last (proper) post. I’ve been heads-down on a Webtop project. One feature that I had to become familiar with for this was CSS. Yes, OpenLaszlo has included support for CSS for some time, although it wasn’t documented. CSS was added to OpenLaszlo specifically to support the Webtop product. Webtop is customizable, but the client (i.e. OpenLaszlo) libraries are precompiled into .lzo files, so developers cannot modify them directly when they want to skin the product.

CSS works in OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 and 4.0.13. I haven’t tried it in the 4.2 branch.

For those of you who don't read Antun's blog, I wanted to make sure you saw his latest on using CSS in OpenLaszlo. Some nice functionality here!

Here is a nice screencast introduction to using the NetBeans IDE Plugin for OpenLaszlo.

You can get the plug-in at https://nbopenlaszlosupport.dev.java.net/

There has been a lot of buzz about Google's improved flash indexing. While this initiative may be helpful for extracting and locating text and media content in SWF files, it probably won't help much with indexing structure. There's no real standard for 'deep linking' into Flash applications. Also, most OpenLaszlo applications they won't get indexed by Google because they're embedded with JavaScript.

So what's a developer to to do? In a nutshell, generate simple HTML for each item in the application which can be crawled by Google and other search engines. Each page uses Javascript to replace the HTML content with an application that starts up in the appropriate state. You can see a live example here from the Laszlo in Action book.

In this example, the items are products in an online store. Each product gets its own URL/HTML page, linked to from index pages or search results. Each product page embeds an application that is passed the product ID so the application comes up in the right context. Deep linking and history still work as users browse products, courtesy of the OpenLaszlo embedding and history system. Try browsing through a few different products - notice your browsing history is preserved - the back and forward buttons work just as they should. Try turning off JavaScript to see the HTML underneath.

This approach ensures each item is indexed by search engines along with pertinent information: price, keywords, artist, title in this case. Because it's plain HTML, SEO and all the other tricks work the same way.

When a user visits the site on a mobile device they get the same simple, functional HTML representation that search engines do. When they visit on a desktop machine, the same page brings up a rich application. To the user it's a seamless experience that's tailored for the device they're running.

This technique doesn't just apply to OpenLaszlo - it can be used for any rich application, Flash or otherwise. Of course, OpenLaszlo 4.1 makes the process really easy with its deep linking and history management support, whether you are targeting Flash or DHTML. For more details, see chapter 15 of Laszlo in Action and the OpenLaszlo documentation.