OpenLaszlo
I still find it fantastic about the internet the way when browsing one thing I find something completely different but equally if not more interesting. I picked up a TechCrunch article on the actual HTML page instead of via RSS simply beacuse I happened upon it via the Techmeme feed first and saw the advert for OpenLaszlo, having read enough about the iPhone for the moment (the article I was reading at the time) I thought I’d investigate more.
As the name would suggest, OpenLaszlo is open source application environment for developing AJAX type internet applications (examples: Google Mail, Google Calendar etc). Now what makes OpenLaszlo interesting and useful is the fact that it supports Flash and now DHTML as the deployment platform. Most complex AJAX applications suffer problems dealing with the differing behaviors of the various web browsers available today. By basing the applications in either DHTML or Flash, the OpenLaszlo team seem to have got around this. Playing with their demo applications in Opera, Firefox and IE this would seem to be quite true.
The applications are written in one or more XML style documents and the markup is quick to grasp and use using bits and pieces of javascript along side XML building blocks, they have built OpenLaszlo explorer which allows you to play around with the syntax easily without downloading anything. The other great thing about the platform is that you can either run your finished application/s as stand alone items on a standard HTTP server such as Apache or you can run it on the OpenLaszlo java based server platform which allows for compiling at runtime.
Its one of those ones which has been around a while and I would be unsurprised if I was one of the last to of discovered it, but I just hadn’t stumbled across it yet. Well worth having a look at the demo’s and/or the explorer at any rate if your a web developer of any kind, the website is a bit flaky here and there!