Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
OpenLaszlo 4.1: DHTML ready for primetime
OpenLaszlo is a fascinating project, and got even more interesting when they went meta, and allowed you to general Ajax applications as well as SWF ones. The 4.1 release is a big one, as it brings full parity to the Ajax side of the house:
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.
At the same time, the team announced 500,000 downloads. Congrats!
This project was always intriguing to me, but the problem it had before was its reliance on certain servers, which made it impossible to use with hosted sites. Now that it can generate the full SWF files, as well as DHTML it definitely is worth another look.
DHTML versions of some of their demos are broken in various ways in ff3. Boo.