Posting this for Henry Minsky:

There is now a way for developers to add comments and examples to the documentation. At the bottom of every doc page is a link that lets you write a comment or tip. The comments will be sent to volunteer reviewers, and if approved will appear on the doc page.

The guideline for comments is similar to the PHP docs; you should add tips or code samples that clarify the documentation on that page. Questions and bug reports should be filed in JIRA or posted to the mailing lists or forums.

You can see the doc-with-comments feature on the docs on the nightly build only for now, for example the reference manual

http://labs.openlaszlo.org/trunk-nightly/docs/reference/

The comment-enabled docs are in trunk, so they will appear on the openlaszlo.org docs with the next release. Please try contributing some comments with the nightly build, so we can debug the comments system. Also send me a note if you want to be a volunteer reviewer.

--
Henry Minsky
Software Architect

We've released version 4.0.15 of OpenLaszlo. This is a bug-fix release for the 4.0 codebase of OpenLaszlo, and is available from the Download Archives page. Please note that 4.0.14 was never publicly released.

This release should be used by anyone programming in the 4.0.x release train. The current official release for OpenLaszlo is 4.2.0, available from the download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.2 is the recommended platform for all application development in the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. The major new feature in OpenLaszlo 4.2 is the introduction of the SWF9 runtime, which can offer significant performance gains. Unlike previous versions of the Flash player, SWF9 has much stronger typing requirements and you must modify your code to take advantage of the performance gains it offers. To assist you in upgrading your applications to OpenLaszlo 4.2, we have provided various conversion scripts depending on your application goals.

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

Late notice, since the call for papers is closing soon, but I just noticed this; CommunityOne is, among other things, looking for papers on RIAs -- so if you're doing something interesting with OpenLaszlo and want to talk about it, here's an opportunity.

CommunityOne is not as well known as its older brother, JavaOne. 2008 was the first year that I got to go. The event is going to be a bit bigger in 2009 — in fact, the event will be held both on the west coast and on the east coast. The conference is focused on “open source innovation and implementation”, and this year the conference planners are looking for talks on “cloud computing and virtualization, dynamic languages and scripting (PHP, Ajax, Python, Ruby, JavaScript), databases (MySQL, postgreSQL), web and application servers (GlassFish, Apache), operating systems (OpenSolaris, Linux), mobile development (Java ME, Android, Symbian), and tools (NetBeans, Eclipse, Sun Studio)”.

Here are the details:

CommunityOne East - March 18-19, 2009 - New York City
CommunityOne West - June 1-2, 2009 - San Francisco
Deadline to submit speaking abstracts: Dec. 11, 2008

(via Ted Leung; thanks, Ted!)

OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta 2 follows OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta as the next build from the trunk
development branch. The primary goal of this release is to provide beta-level support for SWF9
features as indicated below.

Release 4.2b2 highlights include:

• Significant progress on the Laszlo Debugger. It works well in SWF9 for inserting print statements into code for inspection. There is also a new debug tag
  <debug persist="true">, which will keep the debugger window size and position across reloads. Please note that backtrace is not working yet.

• A working Laszlo Profiler in both SWF8 and DHTML

• Improvements to mouse events (onmouseover, mousedown, mouseup) to reduce excess sending of events and to fix edge cases

• A number of bug fixes for the dataselectionmanager

• Significant bug fixes to components (datagrid, comboboxes, floating lists)

• Updated video extensions to current syntax for operation in SWF9

• Audio working in SWF9

• Support for the accessibility APIs

• Support for Japanese characters in the Dev Console

• Laszlo Explorer now runs in SWF9

• FLVs work in SWF9

• Playback controls work for SWF9 animations

• Sample applications: Amazon, Calendar, YouTube, LzPix, and Components Sampler all running in SWF9

OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta 2 is not a fully-qualified release. It has had limited testing for
specific features. This release is intended as a platform for initial porting and testing of
SWF9 applications.

To download this release, please visit the OpenLaszlo Download page.

OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta follows OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 as the next build from the trunk development
branch. The primary goal of this release is to provide beta-level support for SWF9 features
as indicated below.

• Javascript browser communication support (LPP-5857)
• Media streaming (AV components)
• More media support (playing SWF animations, sound)
  Note that there is an existing bug that does not allow playback controls for SWF9. SWF8 animations must be converted to SWF9 to get the playback controls once this bug is resolved.
• HTML tag and mousewheel support
• Laszlo debugger support (you can now use the Adobe debugger, described here)
• Kernel support for embedded fonts, scaling
• Amazon and Calendar sample applications running

OpenLaszlo 4.2 Beta is not a fully-qualified release. It has had limited testing for
specific features. This release is intended as a platform for initial porting and testing of
SWF9 applications.

To download this release, please visit the OpenLaszlo Download page.

If you're trying to get the most out of OpenLaszlo, consider taking one of our training classes on OpenLaszlo. We've just scheduled sessions here in San Mateo for both OpenLaszlo Fundamentals (starting on September 11) and our Building OpenLaszlo Applications (starting on September 8). Sessions in Toronto and Hyderabad are also being scheduled.

More information on the classes is available here

Chuq

Here's a preview to our upcoming releases.

OpenLaszlo 4.1.1
OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 is coming later this week. Our intent is to provide a quick turnaround on bugs reported by the Community. Some of the more important bugs that have been resolved include:

LPP-6586: POST not working with setQueryParams()
LPP-6619: LzTextElement not resizing on subsequent fontsize changes
LPP-6581: Drawview masks subview in 4.1 SWF
LPP-6605: Invalid delegate Warning each time using component gridcolumn
LPP-6589: 4.1 DHTML debugger does not accept all character input

You can find the full list of bugs in JIRA.

OpenLaszlo 4.2
We are also working concurrently on an OpenLaszlo 4.2 release, with an expected delivery date at the end of July. OpenLaszlo 4.2 will include more Community bug fixes, but most importantly, will deliver SWF9 alpha-level support. If you know of important issues, please file them in JIRA directly at http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/lpp. We welcome your involvement and comment on the project. You can join the mailing lists or participate in the forums at http://forum.openlaszlo.org.

We are proud to announce the release of OpenLaszlo 4.1.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 is a major release bringing full support for both the DHTML/Ajax and the SWF/Flash platforms. It also includes over 800 bug fixes and a significantly improved documentation suite.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 has been fully-qualified across the following browser/platform combinations: Safari3/OSX, Firefox2/OSX, Internet Explorer 7/WinXP, Firefox 2/WinXP, and Firefox 2/Linux. We have tested the full suite of demos, samplers, and example applications with the requirement that, when possible, DHTML applications behave the same as their SWF counterparts.

OpenLaszlo 4.1 is now the recommended release for all developers on all platforms, and current users of OL 3.x and 4.0 should investigate upgrading to this new release.

Preliminary support for SWF9 is included in this release but has not been enabled in the developer console. If you want to try this new functionality, you can find more information on using the SWF9 support in the Release Notes (link to come).

For every release, we rely on the OpenLaszlo community to help ensure the quality of the platform release and to determine its future direction. To propose or participate in discussion of new features, see the Wiki. We encourage you to report any problems, and to make suggestions for enhancements, through our JIRA bug tracking system. We'd also like to hear from you on the mailing lists and in the forums.

Upgrading to OpenLaszlo 4.1

There are some changes to the OpenLaszlo release that may require changes to your code to work under release 4.1. Complete details and additional information on the differences between the SWF and DHTML runtimes can be found on the OpenLaszlo Wiki ( http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Runtime_Differences ).

The major change is that user classes are no longer defined as part of the global namespace. This gives OpenLaszlo better interoperability with other frameworks. In your application, user classes defined as:

<class name="Foo" .../>
<new foo(...)

will need to be changed to:

new lz.foo (...)

A script has been posted by Sebastian Wagner to help convert user classes. It can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/laszlo4converter/.

In addition, warnings may now appear if you are using deprecated syntax in your application. OpenLaszlo 4.1 includes a perl conversion script (convert_laszlo.pl) to help mitigate these warnings.

The kind people at Mark Logic have built a mailing list archive tool called MarkMail, which makes archiving and searching messages from mailing lists very easy. They've been nice enough to load the OpenLaszlo mailing lists into MarkMail, and you can access and search these archives at http://openlaszlo.markmail.org/. It's definitely worth checking out.