There's an article on OpenLaszlo in the July, 2008 issue of Linux Journal, Introducing OpenLaszlo by Paul Berry. You need to be a subscriber to either the paper or online versions to read it.
We are thrilled to announce that OpenLaszlo has won InfoWorld’s BOSSIE award, which selects “the best of open source software for the enterprise.� OpenLaszlo has been named "Best of Open Source Software" within the Software category.
OpenLaszlo - formerlery known as the Laszlo Presentation Server - was open sourced in October 2004 by Laszlo, the creator of the OpenLaszlo technology. What was considered to be a risky move by outsiders back then might now be viewed as one of the best closed-to-open success stories, according to Infoworld.
“Some products that were once exclusively commercial got religion, or had it thrust upon them, and re-emerged as open source. OpenLaszlo, a multi-platform rich Web application solution, may be the best closed-to-open success story. Laszlo Systems’ open source conversion unquestionably put the company in the right place at the right time, adding orders of magnitude to its installed base and even setting the stage for Adobe’s incremental opening of its crown jewel Flash and Flex technologies.�
Full article
The ever growing global OpenLaszlo community covering five continents gives proof not only to the technical maturity of OpenLaszlo as a platform but to the acceptance of OpenLaszlo as a true open source technology.
The choice in RIAs comes down to Adobe Flex and OpenLaszlo, and several factors tip the scales toward OpenLaszlo. Flex is still not fully operating as an open source project, and lacks the kind of community at OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo skills are easy to find, and its code base is stable, mature, and tested.
The OpenLaszlo team and Laszlo Systems want to thank our community members at this point. There has been an incredibly positive feedback since 2004, a lot of understanding when things took a bit longer than we thought and and much, much positive energy flowing around OpenLaszlo. The BOSSIE award goes not only to Laszlo and the OpenLaszlo team but to all friends, contributors, committers and developers involved with the OpenLaszlo project.
The idea of open source and an open development process appeals to many people in a world dominated by huge corporations and their products. But our success wouldn't be possible without the effort of everyone working at Laszlo embracing the idea of an open source RIA platform. Without the commercial success story of Laszlo there would be no OpenLaszlo success story.
GlassFish is a "Java EE 5 compatible enterprise-quality Application Server". It's an open source project championed by Sun, we've heard great things about it, and it is compatible with OpenLaszlo!
Check out the details on the Glassfish wiki or in Harpreet Singh's blog.
O'Reilly's OnJava.com contains a set of interviews with prominent Java authors and developers about Java in the post-Ruby world. The article is called Ruby the Rival, and it's worth reading.
The article is mostly about the server side, but OpenLaszlo comes up too. OnJava blogger Robert Cooper is quoted as saying:
What irritates me is that in the "applet" space that Java invented, you look at Flash(plus Flex/Laszlo) and it crushes applets in both "cool" (get me to a good user experience quickly) and "powerful" (I get data binding/SOAP/XML-RPC/etc. for free). The fact that the "powerful" side of that isn't in the core JRE immediately kills the usefulness of applets, and if anyone can show me an applet that looks anywhere near as good as the Laszlo Dashboard demo in a similar number of lines of code, I might have a coronary on the spot. "Cool" counts for a lot, too.
Robert Scoble writes:
I’m still making the tour of Silicon Valley to see ideas of what the Web of the future might look like. I’m talking with Co-founder and CTO of Laszlo, David Temkin, and Senior Product Marketing Manager, Lyndon Wong of Laszlo.
They are showing me their vision of the Web. We’re talking about Flash. They are showing me their new Laszlomail. They are selling that to ISPs. Now, that alone might look interesting, but what’s real interesting is the development framework that they are building. I’ve written about their story before.
But their story is getting much better built out. Today you write Web applications using the Laszlo system in OpenLaszlo. Here’s a tutorial. Today it compiles that app into a SWF (Flash movie) but tomorrow? They are working on AJAX and .NET versions.
So, don’t look at LaszloMail as an email client. Look at it as a new kind of Web application. I call it the higher definition Web. Coming soon to a browser near you.
The W3C Web Application Formats Working Group is chartered to develop languages for client-side Web Application development. The first deliverable is "Specification of a declarative format for applications and user interfaces":
This deliverable should be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute. The format should allow embedded program code. This format, combined with the deliverables below and existing technologies including XHTML, CSS, XForms, SVG and SMIL, should provide a strong basis for rich client application development." – emphasis mine
David was quoted in a San Jose Mercury article about "Windows Live" last week:
"More and more a user's daily experience is going to shift to the Web, off the hard drive and on to the network," said David Temkin, chief technology officer of Laszlo Systems, a Bay Area company that specializes in Web-based applications. "Instead of the Web being an adjunct to the desktop, the desktop is going to be an adjunct to the Web."
Sometimes it's nice to pull back from the technology details to remember the big picture of what the technology is for.
Prakash Singh has published a series about how to use OpenLaszlo with WAS 6.4 (SAP's J2EE Engine), on the SAP Developer Network. Part I, Part II, and "Dazzle your portal content/application with OpenLaszlo". It's short, but packed with screenshots, so if you're a visual learner and struggling to use IDE4Laszlo to develop and deploy, this could be the tool for you.
(From July, but I didn't see it until now.)
The Laszlo Mail team is too busy to toot their own horn, so I'll do it for them:
Robert Scoble writes:
David Temkin, founder and CTO of Laszlo Systems, is bragging to me about Laszlomail - a Flash-based email client. They’ve been licensing it out (EarthLink licensed it out). He tells me they just made it available for free on the Web. Looks very interesting. What do you think?
Nirav Mehta has some tips about debugging web services in OpenLaszlo.
Have been working on web services with Laszlo and I am hitting on some errors! Guess they will be helpful for anybody who’s going to use this.
He's using SOAP, with the <remotecall> tag.
