• 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.

• LZPIX, Weather and Component Sampler work with SWF9
• SWF9 installation packaged with Flex compiler
• databinding and basic replication
• "implicit this" support
• Text, fonts, scrolling and selection APIs
• Keyboard and mouse events
• Multi-frame resource support
• Image loading
• Resource Stretching
• Script Tag Support
• XML-RPC support

This is a limited release inteded only for initial porting and testing of SWF9 applications. See the Release Notes for more details.

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

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

OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 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 4.1.1 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.

OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 fixes many bugs in the initial 4.1.0 release. A list of the bugs fixed in OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 and details about each can be found here: Fixed bugs in 4.1.1

We recommend that all users who downloaded OpenLaszlo 4.1.0 upgrade to release 4.1.1.

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

Please be aware of the following known issue in OpenLaszlo 4.1.1:

LPP-6633: For SWF9 development on Unix, you will need to manually chmod 755 all the binaries in WEB-INF/server/bin/ before you can compile. This is true for both the .war and .gz distributions.

More information on the classes is available here

Chuq

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.

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.

That's a big number. And it's going to continue to grow because you folks are making OpenLaszlo a great environment to build great things in.

Congrats to the OpenLaszlo team -- and everyone involved in OpenLaszlo -- for making OpenLaszlo what it is today.

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.

In this blog entry, I demonstrate generation of a simple RSS Reader using OpenLaszlo. The world certainly doesn't need another RSS reader, so the purpose of this blog entry is to demonstrate some of the easy-to-use features of OpenLaszlo.

The RSS reader shown in this blog entry will focus on blogs hosted on Blogger (blogspot.com). There are two URLs one can use to access RSS feeds from blogs with the blogspot.com domain.

[....]

This OpenLaszlo example provide several observations about OpenLaszlo development. First, this example shows how easy it is to have OpenLaszlo access server-side XML resources using the tag:

request="true"
src="http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />

The dataset tag example shown above uses only three lines to associate a handle/name with the dataset called "blogRssFeed", instructs OpenLaszlo to initialize the dataset immediately, and provides the URL from which to access the data. I could have added the attribute type="http" to explicitly instruct OpenLaszlo that this data is obtained from an HTTP connection (rather than from a file), but using "http://" in the src attribute did essentially the same thing.