After using OL for so many years, I still think that the term "runtime" is used to describe different things within the project.
First, the Wikipedia definitions listed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runtime 1) Run time (program lifecycle phase), the period during which a computer program is executing 2) Run-time system, software designed to support the execution of computer programs 3) Runtime library, a program library designed to implement functions built into a programming language On the OL website, runtime seems to be mainly used to describe the target platform for generated code or bytecode, as can be seen here: http://www.openlaszlo.org/legals "OpenLaszlo 4, the OpenLaszlo architecture has been remodularized into a true multi-runtime platform. OpenLaszlo uses standard ECMAScript Release 3 with some ECMAScript Release 4 extensions as its scripting language. The compiler translates this script to an intermediate language that is then processed by multiple back-ends to translate into an appropriate format for the destination runtime (e.g., SWF byte-codes, or compressed Javascript 1.4)." In the "architecture" diagram, Flash 7, Flash 8, and DHTML are runtimes. That would mean, "runtime" refers to the runtime system in OL's case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-time_system "A run-time system (also called runtime system or just runtime) is software designed to support the execution of computer programs written in some computer language. The run-time system contains implementations of basic low-level commands and may also implement higher-level commands and may support type checking, debugging, and even code generation and optimization. Some services of the run-time system are accessible to the programmer through an application programming interface, but other services (such as task scheduling and resource management) may be inaccessible." The version information in the debugger lists the "runtime" as "Target", and the runtime refers to the either the Flash Player version, or the browser version used. That doesn't seem to be consistent, since there is no Safari or Firefox runtime. The browser or the Flash Player are runtime environments. lzx> Debug.versionInfo() URL: http://localhost:8080/trunk/some.lzx LPS Version: 5.0.x.0 Release: Latest Build: 19258 /Users/raju/src/svn/openlaszlo/trunk Date: 2011-07-14T09:34:04Z Application Date: 2011-07-21T16:17:03Z Target: dhtml Runtime: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.122 Safari/534.30 OS: MacIntel Would you agree with that definition, or what are your thoughts?
