Laszlo Webtop
Laszlo Webtop is a an advanced RIA platform and framework for building highly interactive portals delivering a “WebOS” like user experience, built by Laszlo Systems. Based on OpenLaszlo, one of the leading open source RIA frameworks in the industry, the Webtop integrates pre-built applications like mail, calendar and contacts with a powerful SDK – giving you the ability to extend the product with your own applications.
Laszlo Webtop demo at GoWebtop.com
Here’s a description of Laszlo Webtop from David Temkin’s blog:
Laszlo Webtop “enables the delivery of multiple windowed applications in any browser. You can think of it as a framework for creating and delivering a browser-based “desktop” or “WebOS” experience, in which each application is written using OpenLaszlo. Laszlo Webtop provides the overall user interface, the glue to integrate the applications, and the server pieces that make it possible to integrate existing data and services into a seamless Web-based desktop, or webtop.
With the underlying, open source OpenLaszlo platform Webtop uses one of the most advanced RIA frameworks in the market. OpenLaszlo development has been started in 2001, and the technology has been open sourced in October 2004. Since then the platform has been adopted by global enterprises like Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), IBM for the Websphere Commerce product, Walmart, the Global Hosted Operating System g.ho.st.
Innovating the web mail experience – Laszlo Mail in 2005
In 2005 Laszlo Systems came out with a first product built on top of the OpenLaszlo platform: the Laszlo Mail application. The product received excellent feedback, and some of that has been collected on the Laszlo Mail testimonials page.
Laszlo Mail - advanced Outlook like web mail in a browser
Laszlo Webtop is an evolution of the Laszlo Mail client, breaking the paradigm of one application per browser window. Many of the Webtop customers today want to be able to provide communication services like email, chat, sms, mms, a calendar application, address book as well as a number of other applications within one browser window: which means – they want an RIA framework with window manager, a dock, inter-application communication (SmartObjects, which can be dragged from one window into another) and the ability to deployed as either Flash or Ajax.
The origins – Laszlo Dashboard and Laszlo Calendar
When Laszlo came out with the first prototypes of rich Internet applications (RIA) around 2003 those applications were the Laszlo Calendar prototype (here’s a link to an old version running on OpenLaszlo 2.1.2 and the same application running on a current version of OpenLaszlo with DHTML and Flash 8/9 support) and the Laszlo Dashboard.
Laszlo Dashboard and the Laszlo Calendar prototype already contained many of the features of the Laszlo Webtop and the Laszlo Calendar application inside Webtop. With the Webtop product in 2007 the company finally started building the vision of these prototypes into a product, with the added power of supporting Flash right now and a DHTML/Ajax version of Webtop in the near future.
Articles and News about Laszlo Webtop and OpenLaszlo
Raju Bitter – Competing with Google Voice – Alcatel Rich Communications Manager 5155 for Telcos
Raju Bitter – “Alcatel-Lucent builds converged and unified communication solution with Laszlo Webtop” (May 2009)
Sarah Allen in cinematicinterface.com blog – “Origin of the Cinematic User Experience” (Februar 2008)
Laszlo Systems goWebtop.com blog about the new Laszlo Calendar running inside Laszlo Webtop: “Introducing Laszlo Calendar” (2008)
Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb.com) Laszlo to release WebOS (Nov 2007)
David Berlin/ZDNet – “Laszlo demo: The write once/run anywhere (Flash,DHTML,Java,Silverlight) RIA dev tool?” (November 2007)
Raju Bitter (in German) – “Das Open Sourcing des Laszlo Presentation Servers”, Annual Open Source 2006, Technical University Berlin (October 2006)
Don Hopkins – “What is OpenLaszlo, and what’s it good for” (March 2006)
