Today is a big day for Laszlo.
Until today, we were a software company selling a commercial platform for developing rich Internet applications. Meaning: you could license our software, install it on your servers, and develop and serve an advanced user experience using our server and application framework.
This made a lot of sense in the context of the old software industry model: per-CPU licensing, enterprise sales contracts, vendor lock-in, closed, proprietary code, limited interoperability, source code escrow, and more.
But since the late '90s, things have changed in the software business. It's become clear that open source platforms have a very strong appeal for developers; that technical buyers are very conscious of lock-in, and that the open source development model really works -- especially for platforms and infrastructure (software for developers).
The world has changed, and we've taken notice.
As of now, the entire Laszlo platform is open source software. You can download, install and deploy it for free. The source code is released under the Common Public License (CPL). You can even build proprietary, commercial solutions on top of the open source Laszlo platform. Laszlo itself has shifted its business model from platform licensing to professional services, support, and commercial application development.
But it's not just the software industry that's changing. The Web itself is changing.
What was originally designed as a system for linking hypertext documents (pages of content) has become a platform for data-driven, server-based applications. Most new applications are no longer written for Windows; they're written for the Web. And over the last few years, it's become clear that the Web's page-based foundation can't live up to the needs that applications require.
What's less clear is how to address this problem. There are a variety of ways to work around the Web's limitations as an interactive application medium, but they've all suffered from one or more problems:
With Laszlo's move to open source, there is now a platform that solves these problems. It enables a rich, productive user experience, without compromising on customization or look and feel, while at the same time offering a standards-based (XML, J2EE, JavaScript) way of getting there. It's still the early days of rich Internet applications in general and for the Laszlo platform in particular. We expect to hear quite a bit from you over the next few months -- and we look forward to working with you to move the platform forward.
Laszlo stands at the intersection of two of the most exciting trends in software today: open source and rich Internet applications. We hope that the open source community is as excited as we are about the new applications enabled by the Laszlo platform, and that we can work together to better integrate Laszlo with other open source software -- server platforms, development tools (IDEs), browsers, and new client runtimes.
Let a thousand Laszlo applications bloom. We can't wait.
Posted by temkin at October 4, 2004 07:29 PMDavid,
This is very exciting. My one immediate question, as posted here:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29237#141304
is about how easy it is with the Laszlo platform to create apps that allow the users to properly set fonts sizes to their needs, instead of forcing pre-set fonts on them that may well be too small due to poor eyesight or large screen resolution. Pretty well all Flash-based apps I have ever seen seem to suffer from a lack of any ability to customize them in this area, something I consider inexcusable given the fact that both with native apps and with standard HTML based apps (at least using something like Mozilla) you can properly scale fonts to a user-specific size.
Any chance you can answer on this point, either on TSS or here?
Regards,
Colin
Colin,
It is possible to set the size of fonts at runtime within a Laszlo app -- so you could have buttons within your app that control this, and have the text respond appropriately. However, as of now, the Laszlo app will not receive events when the browser text size is changed. This is on our radar -- thanks for the interest.
- David.
Posted by: David Temkin at October 5, 2004 08:17 AMI care about this.
Personally... I've suffered because I've noticed that a lot of UI designers have moved to really small type faces recently (I presume mostly to save space).... but damn... my eyes hurt!
Here's what I think about the question though:
In the past, Web pages we're one thing and desktop applications were another.
Browser HTML-based web applications are a weak hybrid that maintain more of the UI attributes from Web pages than from desktop apps.
With desktop applications, a good deal of the professional quality, "each pixel matters", UIs are, today, still layed out with specific font
sizes in mind. Simply put, a good number of applications aren't designed (visually) to work with just any font.
With Rich Internet Applications, there will be a middle ground (we hope!). Because the application is served on the web, we might expect it to have some of the common features of a web page like user-configurable fonts. Back button support is another example of such a feature you may expect.
Whether or not to provide these features though is now an application-level decision. And providing some of the common web browser available features in an RIA may requires some work from the application developer. Some applications may want to pay the design complexity and engineering
complexity cost of supporting arbitrary fonts for parts of their UI. Some may not.
Many desktop apps today to not support arbitarary fonts.
Thanks for listening,
Eric
"New client runtimes?" Very interested in this... And in a JavaScript object syntax.
Great work, all.
Hehe...
"Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: p*rn
Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment."
Posted by: Steve Klingspo*n at October 5, 2004 12:46 PMDavid -
Been years. Hope this post finds you well and hope your new approach brings the results you desire! Some additional thoughts here:
http://www.buzzhit.com/2004/10/laszlo-goes-open-source-points-to.html
I left it off my post, but we have a mutual friend from Ofoto doing something interesting with your platform (in private beta for the time being, so I'll leave it there).
All the best,
Tony Gentile
I am downloading the binary; hoping to play with it over the weekend.
The demos are (intentionally?) very impressive. :-)
Good Luck!!!
Cheerio,
Binil
David,
Congratulations and THANKS for this amazing contribution to the open source community! A bold and risky move with incredible potential.
I made some futher comments about this on a TheServerSide related forum thread. You may want to take a look at it here:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29237#141638
Keep up the great work and much luck with the new and interesting challenges coming your way.
Ike
Posted by: Ikester at October 6, 2004 02:17 PMVery good work, really well done. See you again sometime at this interesting place. Say hi to all people around the
world.
I enjoy reading through this informal place. I will surely visit you again to see if anything new appears on it.
Good luck for the future.
Congratulations, this is going to put Laszlo in the sky, hands on work we´re planning to use Laszlo in the EJOSA project http://ejosa.sourceforge.net/ as an alternate presentation layer for the piggy bank, an maybe, use it in OpenUSS, a learning management system http://openuss.sourceforge.net.
Great news!
Thanks Laszlo dev team
Hi,
My comments on this are at the following
http://weblogs.asp.net/astopford/archive/2004/10/06/238831.aspx
Would love to hear peoples thoughts
Andrew
Posted by: Andrew Stopford at October 8, 2004 12:42 AMJust a note, the serverless Laszlo stuff sounds really cool. I'll be WAY more likely to develop to it that way.
Posted by: Luke at October 9, 2004 02:22 PMHi,
I will like to see a small example of java programming working with Laszlo with:
1. Receiving or giving parameters like login page, user registration information, database pagination browsing with JDBC, and database master detail form display.
2. Constructing Laszlo scripting on the fly
David,
This technology is really nice. Thank you and the rest of Laszlo for making this open source. Here is a link to what I am starting to do with Laszlo after a few days of reading the documentation:
http://uv2003.gotdns.org:8090/lps-2.2/examples/hello.lzx
If the URL is down, here is a description of the project on my blog:
http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=UV2003&tab=weblogs&uid=145927419
Great product, thanks again,
Josh
How appropriate is the Flash Lite player mentioned in the article below for Laszlo apps? Any special considerations? Is there a need for Laszlo Lite?
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101173&ref=3729190
Hi, I just started to use Laszlo Yesterday, I think it is really powerfull but I notice a lack of primary features to work with text. For me, the main feature of the WWW is still to present information. The Rich Internet Applications can provide really appealing presentations. Do not forget that the most important is not the packaging but the content. I would be happy to see a bit more features for texts, (CSS style for texts, allignment, colors, etc.) Thank you for all, I will post a link to my website when I finish ;-)
Posted by: Alexandre Melard at October 22, 2004 03:51 PMThank you sincerely for taking this bold step. I intend to move a legislative publishing system to a web based application now you have made this available. Nice to see (hear) an Aussie working for you.
Posted by: Gordon at October 28, 2004 05:50 PMThanks for all of the comments and all of the interest! A few belated responses:
Mark -- Flash Lite does not suport a large enough subset of Flash to run Laszlo apps. As I understand it, it corresponds roughly to Flash 4, whereas Laszlo requires Flash 5 or later.
Alexandre -- You're right, we need better text support. You'll see more in the next major release, which should be available in beta form shortly. This won't address all of your concerns, but it is a step in the right direction.
Posted by: David Temkin at October 29, 2004 07:37 AM