Sun and Laszlo announce Orbit: OpenLaszlo for J2ME

SimHacker writes "Sun and Laszlo Systems have announced project "Orbit": OpenLaszlo for J2ME. OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. The OpenLaszlo 'Legals' project supports multiple deployment runtimes, including Flash and DHTML, and soon J2ME! The FAQ says a proof-of-concept demo will be available later this year."

Comments

Re:Very cool

[quincunx55555]

Have you used Open Laszlo? I attempted to, but after weeks of not finding correct documentation (most info I needed was missing, other parts were incorrect information that steered me the wrong way), forum exchanges, and e-mails from employees I was unable to get their "Hello World" to display anything at all.

It seems like others have been able to do something with it, but I was quite surprized at how much work it took to get to a "broken" "Hello World". My environment might have had something to do with it, but I have a fairly vanilla install of Fedora Core 5; more common than an oddity.

I would be really interested in anyone that has seen practical results from their own work using Open Laszlo.

Re:Very cool

[ultrasaur]

When installing the Linux Flash Player it does require extra steps to get the fonts installed right (Macr/Adobe does provide those instructions). Maybe you ran into that...

This has always worked for me:
<canvas>
      <text>hello world!</text>
</canvas>
If you run it with hello.lzx?lzr=dhtml in the nightly builds of "Legals" you don't even need Flash!

For a practical example, check out http://www.laszlomail.com/ -- this is a very complete webmail implementation with a rich, dynamic user experience that rivals a desktop mail client. More applications are linked from the OpenLaszlo wiki here: http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/OpenLaszlo_Applications

eh....

[Joffy]

I didn't put much time or effort into this, but if you make "hello" and "world" different colors they overlap each other. I actually had to specify "world"'s x and y cooridinates to adjust the spacing. I'm by no means a content creator of any sort other than an occasional whim, but this seems like it would become very tedious. Is there something i'm missing such as an IDE that would make this trvial?

Re:eh....

[gse]

LZX != HTML at all.
you don't get any layout by default; though you could declare a simplelayout to get what you want:

<canvas>
<simplelayout axis="x"/>
<text>hello</text>
<text>world</text>

it's really a different world than HTML authoring; it's application development. this stuff becomes very natural after a bit, and i find it much more pleasant than any other GUI creation frameworks i've used.

(disclaimer: i'm a developer for laszlo systems, but i mean what i write above.)

FAQ Themselves

[Doc Ruby]

The #1 "FAQ" would of course be "can this J2ME OpenLazlo run existing Flash movies on lots of mobile phones?", but that isn't answered in that Sun page.

So I'll also ask "is this Sun's attempt to take over Flash the way Sun has controlled Java, especially now that Flash has clearly beaten Java for mutimedia applets?"

Maybe we'll have to wait until "later this year" to see. By which time those questions will be asked even more frequently.

Re:FAQ Themselves

[ultrasaur]

OpenLaszlo ! = Flash

Re:FAQ Themselves

[Doc Ruby]

OpenLaszlo kinda is Flash:
"OpenLaszlo is designed to use open standards, and built with open source tools and technologies. It's a high level architecture designed to target multiple rendering environments, and the first one it currently supports is Flash.

OpenLaszlo's platform independent architecture gives it the ability to target other runtime environments like DHTML, Java, XUL, Avalon, SVG, open source Flash players "

If OpenLaszlo apps run in Flash VMs, and do what Flash does, then it effectively is Flash, by competing directly with actual Flash code.

Re:FAQ Themselves

[ultrasaur]

Sorry, perhaps my shorthand there wasn't clear...
When OpenLaszlo compiles to DHTML it isn't Flash.
When OpenLaszlo compiles to J2ME it isn't Flash.
When OpenLaszlo compiles to SWF, you could say it is Flash. I would call it a way to create Flash (or to be more explicit, applications that run in the Flash player).

Is that more clear?

Re:FAQ Themselves

[El Tonerino]

No, instead of creating Flash files, it will send J2ME to the phone.

Re:FAQ Themselves

[Doc Ruby]

Yeah, now that your "clarification" reverses your claim refuting my original questions about whether OpenLaszlo can replace Flash for apps in mobile phones, it's a lot more clear.

I'd even go so far as to say "OpenLaszlo is more than Flash".

Declaring layouts in OpenLaszlo

[SimHacker]

Assuming that you used two different text elements, each with its own fgcolor, then my guess is that you need a layout to position the text objects one after the other -- otherwise they all are positioned at x="0" y="0" by default, so they overlap like this (source).

You can put a layout element into a canvas or view, like <simplelayout axis="x"/>, and it magically positions its siblings (the text elements) like this (source). There are even more powerful layouts like the <wrappinglayout/> that work like this (source). [Try resizing the window -- it's very xmasy!]

Another way to make a text element with two different colors is to change the colors with html, using <font color="#ff0000"> tags in the text, like this (source).

-Don

Re:Very cool

[RicRoc]

I went through a lot of the tutorials available via their site, and had absolutly no problems -- on my Windows XP Professional (at work).

Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

I'm sick of hearing about what OpenLazlo will do one day. They still haven't released the final 1.0 version of their DHTML-targeting back end, and now they're hyping up how it'll produce J2ME as well?

I'm not going to touch it while the stable version only targets Flash.

Re:Call me when it's released

[gse]

yeah, it's frustrating when software makes massive progress in full public view, eh? wtf.

the DHTML target has been going since about the start of the year. how soon would you like it to be done?

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

Well, looking at the same demos, I see the same 3 as were working the last time the thing was advertised on Slashdot, and the blog notes that a bunch of basic controls don't work properly and the thing's still in alpha. I'm of the "get a working release *then* announce it" school, I'm afraid.

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

I don't understand what you're so angry about.

Are you complaining that Laszlo developers should be more secretive about their plans and development process, and not tell anyone what they're doing until the software is fully completed and tested? That's just NOT how an open source project works.

Or are you complaining that we're not working fast enough? Then why don't you lend a hand and contribute some of your own time and effort to the open source project? That IS how an open source project works.

If that's not your problem, then what are you complaining about? Do you have some criticism of the design or implementation? Then speak up while there's still time to influence the development process! If we waited until we were finished before announcing our plans, you wouldn't have a chance to give any feedback, effect the design, or contribute your own efforts.

If you're just one of those people who likes listening to yourself complain about Flash, but doesn't actually feel like contributing to any open source software development efforts, then you might enjoy Oliver Steel's Flash Troll Generator. Oliver wrote the OpenLaszlo compiler, so he knows and hates Flash much more than you could ever aspire to.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

Is it just new demos that you want? Well that's easy! Here's an OpenLaszlo YouTube Player, which is a demonstration of the new video api. And of course there's SimFaux and its open source code and content.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

No, I'm saying that I think you should announce things when they're actually ready. Or maybe when they're in beta.

If you want to post a request for participation, then fine, post one. But I'm tired of monthly plugs for OpenLazlo saying "Hey, we've got this great tool for developing AJAX UIs", and when I go look there are the same 3 demos and a bunch of pre-alpha code in CVS.

Google didn't announce their AJAX toolkit until it was usable. Ditto Yahoo.

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

Who are you to say when open source projects should make announcements? Would you lecture Linus that he announced his operating system too soon, and should have waited until it was beta quality? Bill Gates would certainly agree with you, and he'd probably add that it's still not beta quality.

First of all, please read the announcement and web pages before replying, this time. Second of all, we use Subversion, not CVS. Third of all, you can download an installer for the nightly build or the latest stable release from here. And finally, stop complaining that the open source development process is not closed and secretive.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

Who are you to say that I am not entitled to an opinion about how open source projects should be run?

As for reading the announcement, it says "OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software"

That's deliberately misleading. Maybe OpenLaszlo will be a platform for creating AJAX web applications, but right now it's not, it's a bunch of alpha-quality code that's looking for developers. It's that habit of repeatedly making misleading announcements that pisses me off about the OpenLaszlo team.

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

That's not misleading at all -- you're just misunderstanding. OpenLaszlo applications certainly are "AJAX". AJAX stands for: "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". That's exactly what OpenLaszlo is, whether it's running on Flash or the web browser. OpenLaszlo was "AJAX" long before the term was coined.

Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia's Flash player to deliver richer Web experiences. David Temkin tells us why he chose the Flash player as a platform. Laszlo went open source and chose IBM's Common Public License as it was flexible enough to fit their needs without curbing commercial use.

Now can you find anything at all misleading about the announcement, once you understand the standard definition of the terms? You told me privately that you were misled into believing that 1) there was a new production ready product available and 2) there were new demos ready now. I can find nothing in the announcement or web pages that states or implies any of that, so you're just making it up, and reacting to your own straw man misunderstandings. Don't blame other people for your own poor reading comprehension.

Who are you to say that I am not entitled to post an announcement about an open source project on Slashdot? Who else shares your unique "school of thought" that nobody should announce anything until beta?

Let's get back to your original argument that open source projects should not post announcements before they're in beta. Why not? Says who? What are the positive advantages of that? How do they outweight the horrible negative consequences of stifling development and supressing community participation?

What do you have against Linux and every other open source project? You don't seem to understand the first and most important thing about open source software development, and that's colaboration and communication. Operating in secret until beta, as you suggest, is totally against those principles.

-Don

To address the question "Is OpenLaszlo AJAX?", here's something I wrote a while ago (before OpenLaszlo's DHTML support was announced): OpenLaszlo Makes Full Blown AJAX Apps on Flash :

The fact that Flash is commonly used for ads, and that those ads annoy everyone and cause many people to hate Flash, doesn't detract from the high quality user interfaces that you can build with it, if you use it for good instead of evil.

Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.

OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.

Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.

Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of i

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

I'd also like to address your deliberately misleading statement that "It's a bunch of alpha-quality code that's looking for developers." You're implying that OpenLaszlo itself is alpha quality, which is totally false and misleading. OpenLaszlo version 3.3 is quite solid and production quality code. Earthlink is happily shipping Laszlo Mail to millions of their customers, right now. That's certainly production quality by any measure, and you can try it yourself for free.

You're also implying that the announcements of OpenLaszlo for DHTML and J2ME claim that it's production quality, but they certainly DO NOT make that claim -- they're very clear about the development status and timetable. You're obviously just too lazy to read any of the information presented, and you're basing your accusations on your own ignorance and incorrect assumptions. It's you who's deliberately misleading. Go do your homework, kiddo.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Stop blaming others for your own misunderstandings. Take the time to learn about the issues, before making baseless assumptions and incorrect, misleading accusations. It's ironic that you'd get so furious about deliberately misleading statements, when you're the one who's making them, not me nor anyone at Laszlo Systems.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

OpenLaszlo applications certainly are "AJAX". AJAX stands for: "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". That's exactly what OpenLaszlo is, whether it's running on Flash or the web browser.

Flash's ActionScript is not JavaScript. And when most people say "AJAX", they mean web pages that use asynchronous JavaScript and XML, not Flash applications that do.

Note that even the text you quote to support your position says "AJAX-like" methods with Flash, admitting that Flash applications are not what we mean by AJAX even if they happen to use asynchronous XML.

Who are you to say that I am not entitled to post an announcement about an open source project on Slashdot? Who else shares your unique "school of thought" that nobody should announce anything until beta?

Yahoo and Google didn't announce their AJAX toolkits until they were usable. Apache Derby wasn't released until it was a working database you could actually use for real purposes. I'm far from alone in thinking that you shouldn't announce something like it's a real product if it's actually alpha release; that instead, you should get a first working usable release out, then have the product announcement.

If you want to post announcements saying "OpenLaszlo will one day be a toolkit for producing AJAX applications, and we'd like help developing it" then that would be fine. What I dislike is the way the announcements always seem to pretend that it's already a platform for producing AJAX applications, and only when you've had your time wasted checking the FAQs and demos do you find that the code is "pre-beta", there are only 3 demos, and only 2 of those work properly (at least in my browser).

As for all the text about how wonderful Flash is and how it was the right move for you, I really don't care. I have zero interest in developing Flash sites; I'm a web developer, not a Flash developer.

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

I'd also like to address your deliberately misleading statement that "It's a bunch of alpha-quality code that's looking for developers."

Quoting the web site:

Developers wishing to get a head-start building applications on top of Legals will be able to do so with our beta release in a few months.

(Emphasis mine.) What do you call code that's a few months from being ready for beta? I always heard it was called alpha.

OpenLaszlo version 3.3 is quite solid and production quality code.

And OpenLaszlo version 3.3 is not "an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications", as announced in this article; rather, it's a system for building Flash applications. I don't care if you have the greatest Flash generator in the universe; that doesn't mean you have a working AJAX web application generator, let alone one that's ready to use in production.

I don't think you should call something "an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications" until it actually is. Call it a project to develop a platform for creating AJAX web applications; call it a platform for developing Flash applications. Call it a platform for Flash applications that will one day also generate AJAX applications, even. Just be honest about what you have versus what you will have one day real soon now, so that you don't waste people's time. That's all I'm asking.

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

Flash's ActionScript is not JavaScript.

You're wrong about that. But then again, you're the one who proudly proclaims to know nothing about Flash, so I wouldn't expect you to know. But please stop spreading misinformation.

Rhino is Netscape's Java implementation of JavaScript. JScript is Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript. In the same way, ActionScript is Macromedia's implementation of JavaScript. It started out something else, but now it's completely JavaScript. JScript has just as many quirks and bugs as ActionScript, and that's certainly considered JavaScript. OpenLaszlo's LZX language is also an implementation of JavaScript, which the OpenLaszlo compiler translates as necessary to the particular dialect of JavaScript supported by the target platform. You are splitting hairs over the spelling of the name, and have totally lost sight of the original argument.

Your definition of "most people" who say Flash isn't AJAX includes a whole bunch of Johny-come-lately newbies who only heard the AJAX hype recently, and people like yourself who refuse to learn anything about Flash or recognize its right to exist. But sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it go away, or give you the right to rewrite history.

Many people beyond your "most people" have been doing Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for years before the term was coined in 2005: Internet Explorer developers, Flash developers, XUL developers, OpenLaszlo developers, online game developers, and others. AJAX applications running on Flash enjoy all the techniques and advantages of DHTML based AJAX, and fewer disadvantages from incompatible DHTML implementations. So what is your point of trying to narrow the definition of AJAX, just to punish Flash developers?

The literal definition of AJAX is "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". How are Flash and OpenLaszlo not AJAX? They use different JavsScript interpreter implementations, but what they're doing architecturally is exactly the same, and that's what matters. An AJAX program is still fundamentally AJAXian, whether the class it uses to asynchronously load XML is spelled XMLHTTPRequest or LzDataset. If spelling is really more important to you than architecture, then OpenLaszlo provides a compatible API spelled "XMLHTTPRequest".

The fact that you're using DHTML, SVG, J2ME or Flash to draw on the screen is much less important than the fact that you have an JavaScript interpreter in the client ("J"), that asynchronously ("A") downloads XML ("X") from the server.

If you're going to get pedantic about narrowing the definition of AJAX, then consider this: If DHTML was important to the definition of AJAX, it would be "AJAXAD", for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and DHTML." But nowhere in the name "AJAX" can you find a letter that stands for "DHTML".

The "AJAX" architecture has been around for a long time before the term was coined, even before JavaScript, XML and DHTML were invented. I worked on James Gosling's NeWS window system in the 1980's. NeWS was most definitely AJAXian, except that it uses PostScript code instead of JavaScript, PostScript data instead of XML, and PostScript graphics instead of DHTML or Flash.

But beyond having those superficial syntactic differences (and being consistently designed on purpose around PostScript, instead of haphazardly and accidentally thrown together like AJAX), the NeWS window system was most certainly AJAXian, in every important sense of the term. I will concede that NeWS was not literally AJAX the way Flash is, because JavaScript and XML and even DHTML had not been invented yet, but it certanly embodied the most important features of the AJAX architecture: extensibility, asynchronicity, local interaction, sending code and structured data, and defining dynamic application specific protocols.

Here's an article I wrote a while ago, about how AJAX is old NeWS, Laszlo is non-toxic AJAX.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

The misunderstanding that you're spreading and I'm trying to clear up is your implication that OpenLaszlo itself is Alpha quality code. OpenLaszlo is a mature released product, in version 3.3, and many production quality products have been built and delivered with it, like Laszlo Mail. The Legals project targeting alternative runtimes is in alpha, but it works well and it's certainly not vaporware -- you can prove that to yourself by downloading the installer and checking it out.

And as I said in my other posting, OpenLaszlo applications certainly are "AJAX", since they use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Nowhere in the acronym "AJAX" is the letter "D" for "DHTML" -- otherwise it would be "AJAXAD" for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML And DHTML". If you want a new buzzword for the subset of AJAX applications that exclusively use DHTML, then go coin another acronym than AJAX, because AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". And that describes OpenLaszlo to a tee, whether it uses Flash, DHTML, J2ME or SVG for rendering.

And as for your bizarre argument that open source projects shouldn't announce before beta, can you point to at least one other person or open source organization that agrees with you? Don't just cite the names of a couple of proprietary products that happened to have been released as open source software after they were post-beta, like Eclipse and OpenLaszlo. That doesn't mean the Eclipse and OpenLaszlo developers believe that all open source software projects should do the same thing. Can you actually point to anybody else who explicitly states that it's wrong to announce plans for open source software projects before beta, besides you? Well??? Who else can you cite who actually shares your strange beliefs?

Apparently the Slashdot editors disagreed with your bizarre position, and had no problem approving this article. If you want to grouse about their policies, that's considered off-topic for discussion, so you'll have to take it up with them personally. So please stop spreading misinformation in this thread, and stop trying to convince everyone to be more closed and secretive about the way they develop open source software.

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[SimHacker]

Here's the definition of AJAX from another recent article on Slashdot. This definition, which makes no mention of DHTML, exactly describes OpenLaszlo running on Flash:

"Asynchronous Javascript And Xml, popularly known as Ajax, is a combination of Javascript, XML and some coding on the server side. Even though this technology existed for years, many believe it was Google which brought it to the front by implementing it on its sites and thus raising it to the cult status it enjoys now. There is something magical in seeing a website update its content without reloading the whole page, which is the visual essence of Ajax."

AJAX is AJAX whether it uses DHTML, SVG, VML, J2ME, PDF or Flash to draw on the screen. The users don't care about which library is used to draw on the screen: what they care about is that the application doesn't refresh the whole page each time it needs to update some information. Arguing about the brand of JavaScript or the rendering library totally misses the point. The important question is what percentage of desktops does it consistently run on, and Flash's 98% is a great answer. Can you name any platform that's more consistent and ubiquituous?

-Don

Re:Call me when it's released

[metamatic]

Tell you what, if you really want to argue that Flash applications are AJAX, go do it on Wikipedia. The article there doesn't mention Flash at all, and stresses use of the DOM which isn't ActionScript's model, so it clearly needs a lot of correction... When it says Flash applications are AJAX, come back and try telling me so again and I might listen.

Re:Very cool

[quincunx55555]

Someone on the Open Laszlo forums suggested that, but couldn't help me any further (as to which font, etc). The sources they pointed to were quite complex. However, I thought part of the reason for using Open Laszlo was to not have to worry about the client environment as much. Or is this a font that is needed when developing, not when viewing? Is the font not included in the install for legal reasons?

Laszlo, Flex and Flash

[arete]

I'd actually clarify this even more, because Flex is in this space too - it's an awesome tool for producing wonderful powerful Flash applications and has its own sweet bag of tricks.

At this point Flash the IDE is for designers - programmers targetting swfs should be using Flex (which is ALSO free, btw, if you don't want "Flex Builder" which is basically Dreamweaver for Flex) or Laszlo.