IBM WebSphere Commerce uses OpenLaszlo for Management Center UI

In 2007 I’ve heard first rumors that IBM uses OpenLaszlo in the IBM WebSphere product line. Some googling revealed the following quote from the IBM website for the WebSphere Commerce version 6.x:

The  Management Center user interface is a rich graphical Web-based tool that business users interact with, to manage their catalog, promotion, and marketing assets. The Management Center uses OpenLaszlo open source technology, which involves writing declarative XML files with embedded JavaScript.

WebSphere Commerce provides companies of all sizes with a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel and online commerce. The Management Center is built on the Management Center Framework, which includes an OpenLaszlo API for customization of WebSphere Commerce.

IBM WebSphere Commerce Management Center

The latest version of Commerce Development Center has added some features for OpenLaszlo development:

• OpenLaszlo editor
• OpenLaszlo project compilation
• Working with OpenLaszlo files:
  • Search OpenLaszlo files by type
  • OpenLaszlo hierarchy view
  • OpenLaszlo outline view
• Change the default key mappings
• A stack trace option added to OpenLaszlo debug messages

IBM has published some tutorials on OpenLaszlo (Spicing up PHP applications with OpenLaszlo, Web clients fatten up with OpenLaszlo) in the last years, but I wasn’t aware that the company is using OpenLaszlo for creating as large and complex applications as the Management Center within WebSphere Commerce.

When Laszlo open sourced the OpenLaszlo technology in 2004, IBM was the one of the biggest supporter of the OpenLaszlo project, working on an Eclipse based IDE for OpenLaszlo developers. While the IDE project was stopped at some point, it looks like there’s still a lot of interest in the OpenLaszlo technology at the company.