Laszlo Systems Open Sources Rich Client Platform

cying writes "Today, Laszlo Systems released their entire rich internet applications platform (standards-based, zero-install, all-singing / all-dancing) under the CPL. Check out their cool Laszlo-powered web site and see some rockin' groovy demos. Also, read the press release, news, and blogs; download the goods; and join the community."

Comments

Interesting

[XsynackX]

I've never heard of this company or project, and Firefox is being sluggish in getting the plugin for the site, but a platform like this could really be useful to the FOSS community.

Apparently, it's not just flash

[manual_overide]

http://www.davidtemkin.com/mtarchive/000001.html

According to that, it's an actual "language", wherein as you would write C++ and compile it to a machine executable format, you code in LZX, which is then compiled into SWF bytecode.

Flex for free?

[tanguyr]

Interestingly enough, Macromedia is busy pushing it's own XML-based J2EE web application framework for creating "Rich Internet Applications" (read: flash guis) on the fly. It's called Flex and it starts at (are you sitting down?) twelve thousand dollars. Then again, before Laszlo saw the light at the end of the all-powerful, pixie-dusting, open source tunnel (i say PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE SCREEEEEEEN!) they were apparently running at 20K per server license.

On the surface, Laszlo seems to have a lot of things going for it (especially now that it's free) - after all, Flex is still *very* 1.0 - but the rub seems to be that (so far) Laszlo works with Flash Player 5 ("or better...") whereas Flex works with Flash player 7 (the latest and greatest). I know many people around here think flash is just a technology for displaying annoying animated ads and intro screens, but flash player 7 has some very... very... interesting capabilities in terms of "data remoting" (as they call it) and handling all kinds of multimedia content that you can't do in Flash 5. Basically (real quick pundit point here) it looks to me like Laszlo had a good little party going, but now they hear the ominous sound of Flash's parents coming home. Competing with Macromedia on the Flex-Flash axis using a closed source model would be like competing with Microsoft on Windows-.NET using a closed source model: you would need some very very deep pockets.

All in all, good news for us, we get a) some new free toys to play with and b) some pressure on Macromedia to develop more flexible Flex pricing. BTW: when you download Laszlo, there's a page listing all the third party stuff in there: it reads like a rogues gallery of apache/jakarta xml and web app stuff (and i mean the stuff like Batik) along with some nice surprises like RelaxNG. The ultimate proof of the pudding is in the eating, so there goes tomorrow evening.