OpenLaszlo 4.3.0

An open source platform for creating zero-install web applications.
OpenLaszlo is the leading open source platform for the development and delivery of rich Internet applications on the World Wide Web

OpenLaszlo is a tool written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

Laszlo Systems is the original developer, and primary corporate sponsor, of the open source platform named OpenLaszlo. Offered as a free download to developers, OpenLaszlo is used to create web-delivered applications that combine the rich user interface capabilities of desktop client software with the universally accessible, no-download features of web-delivered applications.

With OpenLaszlo, developers can write once and run everywhere..

OpenLaszlo is the industry's first and only RIA platform to support the development and delivery of applications in both Ajax and Flash, all from a single code base.


Main features of OpenLaszlo:

SOLO deployment option: OpenLaszlo introduces two ways to deploy your application: SOLO or with the OpenLaszlo Server. Applications that provide data integration via XML over HTTP may be deployed SOLO (Standalone OpenLaszlo Output) from any HTTP Web server. This capability dramatically simplifies deployment and reduces serving costs. Applications that require data integration via SOAP, XML-RPC or Java-RPC, or that require persistent connection capabilities or run-time media transcoding are deployed with the OpenLaszlo Server within J2EE or Java Servlet Container environments.

Unicode Support: OpenLaszlo introduces support for unicode, enabling OpenLaszlo applications to be localized to most international language character sets. Unicode is supported in both LZX source code and in XML data.

Drawing API: The new OpenLaszlo Drawing API implements a subset of the whatwg.org drawing API standard. This API enables the creation of circles, ovals, fills and lines and provides the foundation for charting and graphing components.

Dynamic Libraries: A dynamic library is a portion of a program that can be loaded after the main application execution file has loaded. The goal for dynamic libraries is to reduce the initial download size of a Laszlo application. This is important because initial download size (including all requests that precede initial user interaction) is used to evaluate web applications. Reducing the initial download size has the additional benefits of reducing the time to first interaction (although there are other ways of doing this), and of reducing bandwidth costs in the case where an optional feature of the application is not used.

Performance Optimizations: Additional optimizations take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Flash 6 and Flash 7 players to minimize application size and increase execution speed.

Platform name change: The platform name has changed from 'Laszlo Presentation Server' to 'OpenLaszlo' to reflect the new SOLO deployment capability, and to underscore the open source license covering the OpenLaszlo project.


Requirements of OpenLaszlo:

Any web browser with Flash 5 or later installed.


What's New in This Release:

Audio/Video APIs are working well in this release. Videoplayer and videoview now show the first frame of the video by default when they appear, if a URL has been set. (You can control this behavior with new starttime API.)

Live broadcast and recording APIs are working in both swf8 and swf9. We have also added a new Audio & Video Programming forum.

Adds two new properties of Debug: printDepth:Number (default 8) limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object when printing it; inspectPrintDepth:Number (default 1) limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object that is a property of an object when inspecting. The debug printer will also detect circular objects (rather than causing a stack overflow), at small cost in overhead. When an object refers to itself (however indirectly), it will be printed just as its type and ID.

Adds a section at the end of every documentation page where you can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs or feature requests should be filed in our bug tracking system as in previous releases.

Updates incubator components to work with 4.2.