Since 2007 the OpenLaszlo team and community members have built a number of small demos showing how features of the upcoming CSS3 improvements like CSS 3D Transforms Module Level 3 and HTML 5 standard could be supported in OpenLaszlo. While those early demos showed us what could be done with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, Firefox 3.5 and Safarix 4.x have enough support and performance to build these features into OpenLaszlo. Test the performance of this OpenLaszlo rotation demo, the Safari/Webkit performance in DHTML runtime is better than Flash 8 right now.
I’ve built some demos with OpenLaszlo, showing very good performance of Firefox and Safari for HTML5/CSS 3 features. Here are two videos for all of you who are still using old browsers, everyone else can test the demos directly, if you follow the link to the original blog post:
OpenLaszlo CSS3 rotation – Koosh Balls
Webkit CSS based 3d transforms applied to OpenLaszlo DHTML
Another HTML 5 demo wich was twittered today shows a fancy animation (JavaScript tracing library, as it looks) and background music playing, all done with open standards based technology. Here’s a video of the application if you don’t have the latest browser installed.
The integration of these and even fancier features – like CSS 3D Transform – into existing JavaScript/Ajax libraries will be relatively easy to do, but how many of your users are going to be able to see the application with all these features? It all comes down to browsers and market shares, and here some numbers from Net Applications. According to this blog post they get the data from 160 million users on a global level. Here are the number they present for August 09.
Net Applications - global market share of browser and versions
So much for people saying: Flash and Silverlight will be dead with HTML 5! Seeing these numbers it can be estimated that probably more than 30-40% of the Internet users by the end of 2010 will still use Internet Explorer, with only limited support in IE8 for HTML5.
Driving HTML 5 and CSS 3 adoption with OpenLaszlo
OpenLaszlo offers a solution here: the RIA platform has a solid Flash runtime, which has been developed for more than 8 years now. Currently supporting Flash8/Flash9, but you can test with Flash 10 as well.
OpenLaszlo Compiler - selecting a runtime
OpenLaszlo supports generation of Flash and JavaScript/Ajax application from the same code base, without making any changes to the code. Don’t be tricked by the entry DHTML, the feature means you have JavaScript generated as output.
That means: you can start using all of the exciting new HTML 5 and CSS3 extension features, and still have a backup for IE users with the Flash version of the application. And OpenLaszlo apps run on iPhone and Palm Pre as well, which means: you are not limited to applications for PCs.
HTML 5 video – open video for the web?
The battle for open standards based web video continues. While it seemed that there could be a general agreement on codecs earlier this year, a few weeks ago it showed that it will be as difficult as expected to win support for one codec by makers of Firefox, Safari and Opera – not to talk about Microsoft and IE here. Technically it’s easy to include open standards based video into OpenLaszlo DHTML applications, and the haXe team has proven that you can support codecs like Ogg and Vorbis in Flash as well.
Right now all of this is experimental: if you want to do web video, and offer an open standards based version of your application – you would have to develop two different versions. OpenLaszlo can help here as well, with a little bit of work full support of open video can be brought into the platform, and the community is working on that already.
And if you want to access the microphone and webcam out of your browser, Flash is still the only cross-platform solution able to doing that – despite all the Silverlight and JavaFX hype. Which means, with OpenLaszlo you have full support for the complete Flash features of the Flash version you are compiling for.
Sounds impressive? It is, and while the OpenLaszlo community has been shrinking in the last 2 years due to the heavy marketing of competing platforms, the technology is ready for a comeback: And you can be part of it!
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