Thanks for the feedback, Sebastian! I get your point. The other side
of the story is, that all the goodies you have with Flash 10 are not
integrated into OpenLaszlo (3d transform, new text layout engine,
drawing API, color correction). If there is solid support for the new
text layout features only, that would really enhance the SWF runtime!
It comes down to the decision if you want to innovate by adopting new
features supported in Flash 9/10, or by trying to support an - in my
eyes - out-dated version of Flash. Flash Player 8 final was released
in 2005, that's a long time ago! The next big thing for Flash is going
to be Flash 10 on Android, webOS and Windows Mobile. Should OpenLaszlo
try to jump onto that train, for the first time making the SWFx
runtime an interesting option for mobile apps? In the end the Laszlo
folks will have to make the decision, but I have the feeling that the
platform is falling behind other RIA technologies innovation-wise. To
me OpenLaszlo is only interesting if I see that there's enough
innovation in the platform. I've shown with a few demos what can be
done with the DHTML runtime, a bit of HTML 5 or CSS 2/3 support. Some
of these features could be matched in the SWF runtime with better
Flash 10 support, and I think that would be a powerful combination.
Other RIA technologies have better tool support, better documentation
and much larger communities = more paid project work!!! That can be
countered by having an interesting feature set. I don't want to raise
the discussion again, but if you look at the response to release
announcements and the activity in the forums/mailing lists, the
community is tiny compared to what it was like in 2005/2006.
Again, I'd be happy to hear what other community members think.
- Raju
On Sep 8, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Sebastian Wagner wrote:
I think if you do that a lot of folks have their *old* apps and are
forced to sit some weeks in their office trying to shift it to AS3,
stay with the old platform or find another solution.
sebastian
2009/9/8 Raju Bitter <[email protected]>
Hm, no answer? Is that something you don't want to discuss with the
community?
On Aug 31, 2009, at 1:05 AM, Raju Bitter wrote:
Do you still plan to support SWF8 with OL 5.0? I believe that OL
needs to shift the focus to DHTML/HTML5 and Flash 10 instead. Flash
8 is just out-dated by now, and I cannot imagine good use for the
runtime. According to Adobe, Flash 10 is installed on nearly 87% of
Internet-connected desktop computers by now:
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2009/07/welcome-to-the-flash-platform.html
The new Flash 10 features are much more interesting for OpenLaszlo
than continued SWF8 support, especially things like the improved
text engine and 3d functionality.
Flash 10 and mobile: Adobe announced a beta version of Flash 10
player for Android, Palm Pre and other phones for October (Max
2009). For some time SFW8 was still an option for Flash Lite 2.1 or
3.0 - although I don't know of any deployed application, but that
will change with the release of Flash 10 player for mobile devices.
I know that Laszlo still uses SWF8 for Webtop, but it will only be
a matter of time until that's not needed any more.
--
Sebastian Wagner
http://www.webbase-design.de
http://openmeetings.googlecode.com
http://www.laszlo-forum.de
[email protected]
