The OpenLaszlo team has announced the 4.4 release of the OpenLaszlo platform. There are many goodies in this release, an impressive number of 180 bugs have been fixed, mainly for the DHTML runtime. That’s good, since there has been a lot of worked focused on the SWF9 runtime until early 2009, and the DHTML runtime need a bit of polishing. Here’s a quote from the announcement:

“This release also has a number of improvements, and significant advances such as:

• Internet Explorer oddities have been resolved, such that it works similarly to FireFox and Safari.
• Context menus have been updated to work with DHTML.
• You can now use non-latin characters (such as Chinese and German) in CSS styles by using utf8 file encoding.
• DHTML now includes the “standard” debugger console, just as swf8 and swf9 do.”

Ongoing improvement of video and audio components in OpenLaszlo

Sarah Allen has done a lot very valuable work to improve the video and audio support in the SWF runtimes. Many bugs have been fixed as part of her work. As part of this ongoing improvement Sarah started a project for better integration of OpenLaszlo with video into Rails (hosted on GitHub.com). She has posted wireframes of the video component in her blog.  I’ll devote some time to testing the components and adding one or the other feature. I believe that any RIA framework needs some feature where things are much easier to do than with other frameworks. Having the best working and simplest-to-use video components in the RIA space would definitely be such a feature. (more…)

It’s stunning to see how much companies manage to upset people using their technology by not replying to questions. One of the best examples in the RIA space right now is Adobe’s communication around the Flash FP-40 bug. Flash is a nice technology, but why is it so difficult for the company to talk to the community. FP-40 was reported in early April 2008, and it’s a very annoying bug. And still no-one from Adobe can tell us when that bug is going to fixed!

One of the advantages of open source is, that you can fix bugs in the software products you want to use. While Adobe started open sourcing some technologies in the past, the Flash Player still is a proprietary piece of software. With the tough RIA competition from Microsoft Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX Adobe will be under a lot of pressure within a relatively short period of time. I can already see the prices for the Flash tools tumble.

Undere these circumstances it’s even harder to understand why the Flash community doesn’t get any good information on when such an annoying bug as FP-40 will be fixed. Sure, it wasn’t only Adobe’s Flash Player causing the problem, but is it so difficult to talk to the Firefox community and try to find out what it takes to fix a bug like that? Adobe already has a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation for the Tamarin Project, it shouldn’t be difficult to get some experts from the Firefox team to help with the bug, even if Adobe has to pay for that. After the Firefox side of the problem was fixed with the release of Firefox 3.1, Charles Liss of Adobe is working on a fix now - which should be available with the next release. Thanks, Charles, for taking on this issue - and well all hope that there will be a quick solution to the problem. I’m not blaming you, but maybe some people in higher positions at Adobe think about how such a no-communication strategy backfires for them. Is Adobe under so much pressure already that you can’t afford to answer simple questions?

Maybe you should reconsider your open source strategy for your Flash product line: you might get quicker fixes for your bugs in Flash Player if most of the code - which can be open sourced - would be open sourced. Actually I don’t believe that’s going to happen, but maybe the idea makes some people think. There are valuable development resources in the community very willing to assist the Flash team. After all, Flash is a cool technology!

For some time I’ve thought about open video support in OpenLaszlo. Since Mozilla and Wikimedia announced that they join forces to implement open video in January 2009, that idea has crossed my mind several times. France’s leading video site Daily Motion has built an example website supporting the HTML 5 video tag at openvideo.dailymotion.com (you need Firefox 3.5 for testing), and it looks very cool. Here’s some more information on the HTML 5 based video support in Firefox 3.5.

The W3C states in the draft for the HTML 5 standard, that

Implementations are free to implement support for video codecs either natively, or using platform-specific APIs, or using plugins: this specification does not specify how codecs are to be implemented.

Google has announced to support Ogg and Vorbis codecs, as CNet.com reported in May:

Google has begun supporting a new HTML feature to show video in its Chrome browser as an alternative to Adobe Systems’ much more widely used Flash, but the technology overall remains rough around the edges.

The support comes in Chrome 3.0.182.2, a developer preview version that on Wednesday inaugurated work on the 3.0 generation of the Google browser. HTML video is one of a handful of technologies in the still unfinalized HTML 5 standard that Google hopes will transform the Web from a collection of relatively static sites to a foundation for full-blown applications that rival those on PCs.

OpenLaszlo as one of the leading open source RIA platforms should - in my opinion - implement open video support for both DHTML/Ajax and the Flash/SWFx runtime - starting with DHTML/Ajax. For anyone in the community interested in supporting such an effort, feel free to join the discussion in the OpenLaszlo JIRA - where I created an issue for this feature. I’d be happy to work on that feature, given there’s enough interest in it.

This week Palm launched the company’s open source portal opensource.palm.com, containing the modified Linux packages for the webOS mobile operating system. In a blog post Palm talks about what open source software (OSS) means to the company:

We’re using Linux and various other open source software in webOS to allow us to accelerate innovation through collaboration with the global community of open source developers.

The benefits of teaming with the open source community come with the important responsibility of ensuring compliance with applicable open source license obligations. For that, we have established a compliance program including:

• Enforcing open source compliance policy, processes and license obligations;
• Establishing an internal team to oversee open source compliance;
• Using a range of commercial and Palm-developed tools to help with the compliance activities including a compliance project management tool, an open source software inventory tool, a code scanning tool, a linkage analysis tool; and
• Establishing open source internal training to continue to raise awareness and reinforce open source compliance within Palm.

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When Google made the announcement of Google Wave - with first screenshots of the application showing up - I immediately thought: finally they seem to understand what the future of web/browser based real time communication could look like. And my next thought was: will they ever be able to deliver a user experience as good as the one Laszlo Webtop gives us right now. Let’s look at screenshots of both applications to give everyone a better understanding of what I’m talking about.

Google Wave looks like a modern, Ajax based portal with a desktop/web OS like user interface. 

Google Wave - a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web

And here a screenshot of the Laszlo Digital Life applications suit as Laszlo Systems envisioned the solution back in 2006/2007. A WebOS like UI with dock, window manager, pre-built animations for state-changes and the power of the OpenLaszlo RIA framework in the background:

Laszlo Webtop - Laszlo Digital Life Suite

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There’s a new OpenLaszlo application online in Germany: Taxango, an online income tax return calculator and tax declaration tool for employees in Germany.

Taxango - German income tax declaration tool - built with OpenLaszlo

A nice application with a stylish design, skinned components and animated transitions in the process of filling out the various form fields. Reminds me of what H&R Block has been doing with OpenLaszlo around 2007 in the US - their tax calculator solution.

If you are interested in running a powerful, Java based office solution on your mobile Internet device (MID), check this presentation of Thinkfree Office Mobile MID Edition at CTIA:

Another great product from Thinkfree, provider of the most innovative online and offline office solution - and a tough competitor of Google and the GoogleApps solution (actually I think that Google will have a hard time to competing with Thinkfree in the long run, since Java is the much better technology for building an office solution than Ajax and GoogleGears).

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Kabel Deutschland, Germany’s largest cable television company, announced a new mobile offering for their customers in Germany, thereby entering the quadruple play market. A quadruple play service combines the triple play service of broadband Internet access, television and telephone with wireless service provisions.

Kabel Deutschland starts mobile service offering with O2 Germany

The mobile service at present is available only for KDG Kabel Internet & Phone subscribers and is dubbed as Mobile Phone. The tariff offered by the operator has no monthly costs. The subscribers will also enjoy free on-net calls to KDG telephony subscribers and other Mobile Phone subscribers. The calls will be offered to other German fixed and mobile networks at EUR 0.15 per minute. For EUR 4.99 a month, the subscribers will get a flatrate for calls to German fixed networks. (more…)

RIA runtimes are getting more complex with every new technology available in the market. Building “pure Ajax” applications in many cases already means that you’ll embed a SWF movie file into your page for audio playback or video functionality. Technologies with support for multiple runtimes - like OpenLaszlo - create APIs for integrating applications deployed in different runtimes. In OpenLaszlo’s case that would for example be a video player or chat component deployed in an OpenLaszlo application utilizing the DHTML runtime, like in this example application of an Ajax MP3 player using a SWF runtime OpenLaszlo app for playback of the audio.

JavaFX is another technology that would be perfect for building mixed runtime applications. Imagine you want to re-use a widget you built in Ajax or Flash within JavaFX, with the ability to drag the application onto your desktop? Sun announced the JWebPane or HTML component last year, which effectively is a Webkit browser embedded into JavaFX. 

JavaFX JWebPane Demo from JavaONE 2008

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Netbooks with Intel Atom like CPUs will trigger the next Internet revolution: not a ubiquitous web, but more in a sense of offering a good compromise between computing power, mobility and the ability to do things like email, chat, office functionality and what else you tend to do with your private PC. But netbooks will add a new class of computer/software solution packages for businesses as well: for the millions of employees world-wide that don’t need the full functionality of an expensive desktop system with an equally expensive Microsoft Office product. First signs of the revolution could be detected when Google signed a global partnership with CapGemini for the Google Apps Premier Edition - a service which CapGemini calls “Workplace Services”. It’s amazing to see what Google managed to do within the browser with their Google Apps offering, but I personally like the performance of desktop applications and offline availability for my office solution.

Then again, running Microsoft Office on a Netbook is not fun, loading takes long, everything feels a bit sluggish - not a good user experience. And what about the OS questions: why not use a slim Linux OS instead of the bloated Microsoft Windows OS? There a lots of powerful and safe Linux system in the market, and companies like Ubuntu offer a great user experience with Linux distributions optimized for Netbooks, like Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. If you settle for Linux system and need good Microsoft Office support for your documents, OpenOffice doesn’t offer the Microsoft Office compatiblity you need in an workplace environment (more…)