Comments on: OpenLaszlo DHTML CSS 3 demo – to Flash or not to Flash, is no question!

By: Announcing Mobile OpenLaszlo – OpenLaszlo based W3C Widgets, native Smartphone Apps and OpenScreen Project Apps

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:34:18 +0000

[...] application is a small OpenLaszlo demo I wrote last year to show how some of the HTML5/CSS3 features can be used in OpenLaszlo today. The [...]

By: Showcase Of Really Cool Live CSS Demos

Showcase Of Really Cool Live CSS Demos — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:27:35 +0000

[...] OpenLaszlo DHTML CSS 3 Demo [...]

By: November OpenLaszlo Newsletter

November OpenLaszlo Newsletter — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:21:46 +0000

[...] In case you missed it, the October edition is still available, which covers built-in dropshadow functionality in OpenLaszlo. Check out Raju’s blog for a demo of this feature. [...]

By: How long is Adobe Flash going to be around?

How long is Adobe Flash going to be around? — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:17:40 +0000

[...] following screenshot shows the OpenLaszlo text shadow demo I built a bit ago, running in Chrome Frame on IE8/Windows [...]

By: Raju Bitter

Raju Bitter — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:12:47 +0000

As I agree with Mike’s comment on the bad user experience with Internet Explorer, I’ve modified the application for browsers without support for text-shadow. Before the DHTML version of the app never loaded in IE, showing the loader spinning. The updated version displays without the text-shadow, displaying a message that the user’s brower doesn’t support the CSS feature used here.

That message will be displayed for older versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera as well.

By: Raju Bitter

Raju Bitter — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:43:04 +0000

@Antun: Text-shadow based on CSS is only available in Firefox 3.5+. And the OpenLaszlo app is simply embedded through an iFrame plugin in Wordpress.

@Mike: On the application not showing up in IE: I haven’t it stated it there, but IE doesn’t support CSS text-shadow support. I mentioned that many times in the previous blog posts on the subject. The genereal idea is to have a Flash version for IE, and the open standards based versions for Webkit, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and the next version of Opera supporting these features.

You have some good points, Adobe wouldn’t be successful with just providing a runtime plug-in for the browser. The company has the some of the best products for an integrated workflow of design, UI engineering and – to a lesser extend – coding. Flex Builder isn’t really a great product, I think Java or .NET/WPF/Silverlight IDEs are much more advanced. I bought Flex Builder 3, and there’s no refactoring, not even source code formatting. And the Flex compiler is painfully slow, I heard of large projects having a compile time of up to almost 10 minutes.

Microsoft, IBM or Sun are far ahead of Adobe when it comes to engineering languages, compilers and browser plug-ins delivering state-of-the-art performance. You can simply see that when you compare Silverlight and JavaFX performance with that of Flash. To be fair, the JavaFX user experience launching an application sucks compared to Flash. But Microsoft is going to take huge share of the Flash business with Silverlight.

Flash and cross-platform issues? There are more than enough issues, let me just point to the sad FP-40 bug, with no unicode support for Flash under Linux. The last company I worked for wanted to deploy Flash communication portals on Linux netbooks for cable Internet customers in Germany. Due to the fact that you can’t even enter the @ char with a German keyboard, the whole business is on hold, until FP-40 is fixed. Based on what I read, the problem shows up on combinations of Windows with Firefox as well.

United Internet/GMX – Europe’s leading web mail provider – built a Flex webmail client, launched it – and had so many problems with Flash and input, that they took the application offline. In the end they developed their own open source Ajax framework for an RIA based webmail client: Qooxdoo.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:11:05 +0000

One of the reasons for the success of Flash is that Adobe knows designers and makes good tools creating content. In addition to using the timeline in the Flash IDE, a designer can work in Photoshop or Illustrator and import assets as layers — a huge time and effort saver. Until someone develops an alternative to this workflow and integration I think designers will continue to prefer the Flash platform. If you’re building RIAs, Flash assets can also be used with Flex or AIR.

Also, I’ve rarely encountered a cross-platform issue with the Flash Player, which is one of the many reasons that developers use it. The DHTML/CSS version above doesn’t display for me in IE7 (I just get the spinning “Powered by…”) but the Flash below it does.

By: Antun Karlovac

Antun Karlovac — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:18:03 +0000

That’s a cool demo Raju. FYI the moving shadow behind OpenLaszlo didn’t appear in Firefox 3 for me. It works correctly in Safari.

Did you write your own WordPress embed code for embedding the DHTML version of the application in this blog post?

-Antun