OpenLaszlo – advanced RIAs the open standards way

OpenLaszlo is one of the most advanced RIA platforms, which is mainly sponsored by Laszlo Systems – one of the early day pioneers of rich Internet applications. While OpenLaszlo has been developed since 2001, the platform has been open sourced in October 2004.

Enabling Flash-like RIAs the open standards based way

Generally the RIA technologies can be divided in a group of technologies using proprietary browser plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight, and the large group of other technologies using open standards and JavaScript engines, Java or other open source extensions to run in the browser. Until now the proprietary plug-ins have given us features for multimedia support, visual effects and drawing APIs which have not been widely supported by browsers. The evolution of browsers and JavaScript engines – in combination with evolving standards like HTML5 and CSS extensions changes that.

OpenLaszlo will play a major role in enabling a smooth transition from Flash-based RIAs to equally powerful open standards based RIAs by providing a Flash version of an application for old browser – especially the Internet Explorer family – and a JavaScript/DHTML based version for modern browsers like Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4.x, Webkit, Google Chrome and Opera. And if you don’t believe that open standards based RIAs can be as visually appealing as Flash or Silverlight applications, check this OpenLaszlo demo utilizing CSS3 effects (best viewed in Webkit, Firefox, Safari and Chrome):

OpenLaszlo – the platform

With  almost 9 years of development the system is very mature, and has some amazing features in comparison with other RIA technologies like Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and the many JavaScript/Ajax frameworks in the market:

• OpenLaszlo applications run in both JavaScript and Flash mode with identical appearance
• LZX language – an XML/JavaScript based language for building enterprise-scale applications. LZX has been optimized for
  • Modular development of applications
  • Support for classes and prototype-based development
  • Animation, powerful pre-defined layouts, custom layouts, state management and transitions
  • Connecting to web services (XML, JSON, Java-RPC, SOAP)
  • Support for runtime specific code (ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, SWC libraries)
• Component based development approach, with pixel-perfect rendering of components in different runtimes