Monday, February 5th, 2007
Laszlo Webtop
David Temkin has previewed Laszlo Webtop “a commercial product that enables the delivery of multiple windowed applications in any browser. You can think of it as a framework for creating and delivering a browser-based “desktop” or “WebOS” experience, in which each application is written using OpenLaszlo. Laszlo Webtop provides the overall user interface, the glue to integrate the applications, and the server pieces that make it possible to integrate existing data and services into a seamless Web-based desktop, or webtop.”
The final release will support OpenLaszlo 4, which will mean support for both Ajax and Flash applications.
3.1 rating from 38 votes
Why do these things never have any whitespace?
It’s all just this grid full of widgets widgets widgets.
This is a good accomplishment for OpenLazlo. They are setting their mark in the RIA industry like never before. I am wondering how Adobe will react and push their Flex platform in the light of these development. I mean how can they leverage Flex, if you have platforms such as OpenLazlo that enables Flash and Ajax development?
lmat: theres tons of whitespace in the example here - a candy-like green puzzle piece inside a big white box with a black border - quite cuter than the abomination in the screencap above.
what exaxtly is ‘open’ about this thing if its running in closed environment that itself cann only run run unless youre on x86 (or ppc and OSX)?
btw, the reason theres so many typos in that post, is someone doesnt know about CSS, and the text box is ultra-light-gray-on-white here. so i cant read it without selecting all and i cant be arsed to do that
note to CSS tweakers: if you set a foreground color, set a background color that looks right with it. and vice versa!
noting the XP/system7/OSuX-esque close/zoom/resize icons on the windowing toolkit above - didnt craptromedia learn anything from the MX interface? do users really awnt to resize a bunch of windows inside a big gray box? that was just about the worst thing about windows, that 90% of apps still force all the windows into a giant box..unless they use that zooming palette hack where you lose a bunch of the normal window features like resize..
the developers should check out DWM.
The mail application shows how good the platform is, and it is highly responsive and intuitive.
I gave the demos a 2 hour run through, and read some of the documentation for open laszlo, and I have to say… although similar to any other tag based language, it does accomplish a lot with only minimal programming.
Look at http://www.pandora.com and tell me that isn’t an awesome application. Open laszlo has fount a niche in the world of web applications that function like desktop apps, and just by looking at users of open laszlo like IBM and such, I want to use it. IBM’s demo that I found from the openlazlo site was awesome.
I think, Laszlo using Flex/MXMl, which is very good language for building online GUI applications. But I like to see better 2D/3D graphic-primitives support to build custom GUI Widgets.
Carmen, just a remark. You asked:
>>>what exaxtly is ‘open’ about this thing if its running in closed environment that itself cann only run run unless youre on x86 (or ppc and OSX)?example LzPix application at http://www.openlaszlo.org. That will give you an idea what DHTML/AJAX and Flash support means. Running in modern browsers Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera, without the Flash plug-in.
Oops, that last comment got cut off. Looks like the comment function doesn’t like < so much. :-)
Ok, what I meant: The 4.0 version of OpenLaszlo will output DHTML/AJAX and Flash. The Webtop will run with Flash and with DHTML/AJAX, so you are not blocked out if the Flash player isn’t running on your system. And chances are good that there will be other runtime support in the future, like Java or even WPF.
I’ve been following Laszlo for a while now, and 4.0 looks like it’s going to be a real winner, with the addition of DHTML to the SWF generation.
I can’t believe this works with Opera.
R&I at safe supplements