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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."
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.
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
Take what I say here with your usual Slashdot-comment grain of salt because I've taken only a brief look at this thing.
From the download page:
Okay, so this is just a way to great Flash GUI's. My initial reaction was "BLEH! I can do that already with Flash."
What gave me pause was that this was a impressively sophisticated way to create Flash GUI's using Open Source tech. Macromedia's expensive authoring tool is not required. Everything is driven by XML+JavaScript from the server side.
So, yeah, it's just a server-side Flash generator. It's also one of the more sophisticated Open Source Flash creation tools I've seen yet. So there's that.
Last time I checked, Flash was not a web standard in the true sense, was still a proprietary technolgy and you couldn't redistribute the player (so it can't be bundled by your favorite distribution).
Pretending that this product is standards-based is like saying MSOffice is standards-based because it can import/export XML.
Are we to expect a future release supporting SVG - as the backend seems to be modeled around XML/ECMAScript? That'd be most impressive - and web engine friendly, at last.
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
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.
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