Thanks, Tucker. Really appreciate your detailed answers!
I love the idea of canvas.features - an intelligent way to add
features which won't be available in all officially supported
runtimes. The thing I'm mostly concerned about is that we stay with
the lowest common denominator, which would be the feature set of SWF8/
AS2 right now.
And a holiday is good reason to not be working. :-)
Cheers,
Raju
On Sep 8, 2009, at 2:10 PM, P T Withington wrote:
On 2009-09-08, at 00:09, Raju Bitter wrote:
Hm, no answer? Is that something you don't want to discuss with the
community?
Not at all. Just that 7 September is the US Holiday "Labor Day",
where we celebrate out puritanical work ethic by not working at
all. :P
Let me try to address what I see as the important points in this
thread.
On 2009-08-30, at 19:05, 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.
swf10 is already supported, it's just not visible in the developer
control panel. If you want to compile your application swf10, you
can specify ?lzr=swf10 in the query arg of a webapp, or --
runtime=swf10 on the command line. Compiling to swf10 does not
currently change any features in LZX, but it will enable you to
directly access the swf10 platform features. We are currently
scheduling when to "reveal" swf10 support.
As we have discussed in the past, a feature of OpenLaszlo is that it
does not prevent you from directly calling the underlying platform
from LZX. Although this is not recommended, because it locks you in
to a particular platform (and if you access OL internals to do it,
your code will be fragile), it is a good way for developers to
explore features that should be added to OL. While exploring, we
encourage you to think about how to make a platform-neutral API for
your feature, and hope that you will contribute your work back to OL
so that your feature becomes supported (for you) and available (for
the rest of the community).
On 2009-09-08, at 02:35, 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.
This was definitely true with 4.2, but has significantly improved in
4.5. With the compiler.catcherrors feature, it should be the case
that DHTML and swf9 are much more debuggable without resorting to
the browser or Flex debuggers. We will continue to improve this
feature. Also, we are supporting the `displayName` on functions
now, which makes OL code much more debuggable in the Firefox and
Webkit debuggers.
On 2009-09-08, at 05:03, Quirino Zagarese wrote:
I don't think there is a real choice: you
simply cannot do things like 3d transform in swf8. If you don't
support it
anymore in OL5, people can still use OL4.* if they need swf8
support. Swf8
support in OL4 is quite stable indeed.
The model for this is the `canvas.features` list. When we add a
feature to the OL API that cannot be supported on all platforms, we
add a debug warning for the API on unsupported platforms that
explains how to test for the feature in your code. This leaves it
to the application developer to decide how portable they want to
make their program and how to best handle the lack of a feature.
swf8 support therefore costs us almost nothing. As you point out,
it is very stable. But, even if you stay with swf8, there is a
transition cost to go from 4.0 to 4.2, because of the API
refinements that were needed to support the multi-runtime
environment. If you want to evolve your application, you will need
to move forward onto the modern platform. Once you have made the
move beyond 4.2, I think you will find the cost to verify that your
application also runs in DHTML and swf9 will be small.
On 2009-09-08, at 05:23, Rami Ojares / AMG wrote:
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?
The man with the money!
Or do they also live in the modern matrix organisation.
See my article [What does "open source" mean to the OpenLaszlo user?]
(http://bit.ly/9WiRl).
Currently, Laszlo Systems is the primary sponsor of OpenLaszlo
development, but we have also had major funded developments by
G.ho.st and IBM (among others). And major contributions of
development by the community (many of the prime contributors are
represented in this conversation). So, we do live in a "matrix
organization" -- there are many competing interests and many ways to
get OpenLaszlo to evolve.
---
My bottom line: We are moving forward. Raju has demonstrated some
of the amazing things that can be done with HTML 5 and Flash 10, and
I expect to be integrating more and more support for these
technologies into OpenLaszlo in the near future, with the support of
our major backers and the continued help of the community.
--ptw
