Oh, nice discussion! Great, that's what I was hoping for!
True, a stable business is the basis for a solid and continuous
evolution of a platform. A purely product and feature focused
evolution on the other hand is not healthy as well. Think of the DHTML
runtime: announced in early 2006, first released in Mai 2007 - and now
Laszlo is migrating Webtop to the DHTML runtime! A full 3 years of
development before the company can utilize the runtime for their own
product! If Laszlo would have focused on optimizing the SWF runtime
for Laszlo Mail/Laszlo Webtop back in 2006, we wouldn't have a multi-
runtime system now. There were reasons why the decision was made to
develop a new runtime next to SWFx. And there was pressure to show
that Laszlo is not "Flex clone".
Time has shown that it takes the development of at least one larger,
more complex product to make an OpenLaszlo runtime stable: g.ho.st for
SWF9, and now Laszlo Webtop for DHTML - and it would be good to see
other corporate sponsors in the future. For enterprise adoption of a
technlogy the market penetration and number of available experts is
critical. As a result that means: it's easier to sell OpenLaszlo based
products - including Webtop - if the number of people and companies
involved with the technology is higher.
For the first time since the DHTML runtime has been announced there is
a number of browsers in the market with extraordinary performance for
JavaScript execution: Google Chrome, Webkit based browsers, Firefox
and Opera. The performance matches - and even tops - the performance
of the SWF8 runtime. And based on Google's strategy - as well as
Apple's - it's easy to recognize the fact that Flash is not considered
to be the preferred RIA runtime for desktop and mobile apps.
In my eyes that means: opportunity's knocking! If we - the community
and the OpenLaszlo team - manage to come up with an impressive
OpenLaszlo DHTML demo within the next 6-8 months - similar to the
innovation shown in the Laszlo Dashboard and Calendar in 2002/2003 -
we can drastically raise the level of attention this great technology
gets. But such a demo might mean, that not all of the features in
there will be supported for SWF8. If we show features like 3d
transform enabled components in DHTML, we should have at least one SWF
based runtime showing the same features. And that's not a huge amount
of work, but something which could be an OpenLaszlo team and
OpenLaszlo community project: let's build the coolest JavaScript/Flash
RIA demo in the market, based on OpenLaszlo 5.0! In other words: let's
recreate the vision of OpenLaszlo as the open source state-of-the-art
RIA platform.
And thanks for every single comment and opionion voiced in this
thread, really appreciate it!
- Raju
On Sep 8, 2009, at 11:23 AM, Rami Ojares / AMG wrote:
Sebastian is right of course.
But now we should find out what the laszlo folks think about this
issue.
Further is there a man in laszlosystems who calls the shots?
Or do they also live in the modern matrix organisation.
- rami
I think folks at laszlo should do whatever fits into their products
best. Best for the project will be if a healthy company standing
behind it and supporting the development. After all a big community
is nice but the number of users who will ever do the step from a
user to contributer that adds significant changes to the core is
very little. So in general big communities are good for getting you
a job but a big part of improvements and contributions are done by
the one's that are paid to work at laszlo.
sebastian
2009/9/8 Raju Bitter <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
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]
<mailto:[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://www.webbase-design.de/>
http://openmeetings.googlecode.com
<http://openmeetings.googlecode.com/>
http://www.laszlo-forum.de <http://www.laszlo-forum.de/>
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
--
Sebastian Wagner
http://www.webbase-design.de
http://openmeetings.googlecode.com
http://www.laszlo-forum.de
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
