GlassFish is a "Java EE 5 compatible enterprise-quality Application Server". It's an open source project championed by Sun, we've heard great things about it, and it is compatible with OpenLaszlo!
Check out the details on the Glassfish wiki or in Harpreet Singh's blog.
The December 5, 2005 issue of VAR Business features a cover story on IBM's open source strategy. Quoting from the opening 2 paragraphs:
Big Blue's Bet Pays Off
IBM's open-source gamble creates opportunities for partners
By Ed Scannell, VARBusiness
From the December 05, 2005 VARBusiness
"Eighteen months ago, Laszlo Systems was a 2-year-old start-up selling proprietary software tools to build Web-based applications. Living off venture-capital money and generating very modest revenue, Laszlo Systems president and CEO Steve Ciesinski worried about the future. But then he made a bold move that paid off and captured the attention of one of the world's biggest IT vendors.
Ciesinski took his tools open source. And the product, OpenLaszlo, caught the attention of IBM, which helped to create a developer kit for the toolset and placed it into its Eclipse foundation for further dissemination. All told, downloads of the product went from 200 per month to 9,000. The story stands as an example of open source's growing acceptance and the market legitimacy that comes from having IBM's backing."
More media coverage of OpenLaszlo is aggregated at:
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/MediaCoverage
O'Reilly's OnJava.com contains a set of interviews with prominent Java authors and developers about Java in the post-Ruby world. The article is called Ruby the Rival, and it's worth reading.
The article is mostly about the server side, but OpenLaszlo comes up too. OnJava blogger Robert Cooper is quoted as saying:
What irritates me is that in the "applet" space that Java invented, you look at Flash(plus Flex/Laszlo) and it crushes applets in both "cool" (get me to a good user experience quickly) and "powerful" (I get data binding/SOAP/XML-RPC/etc. for free). The fact that the "powerful" side of that isn't in the core JRE immediately kills the usefulness of applets, and if anyone can show me an applet that looks anywhere near as good as the Laszlo Dashboard demo in a similar number of lines of code, I might have a coronary on the spot. "Cool" counts for a lot, too.
Robert Scoble writes:
I’m still making the tour of Silicon Valley to see ideas of what the Web of the future might look like. I’m talking with Co-founder and CTO of Laszlo, David Temkin, and Senior Product Marketing Manager, Lyndon Wong of Laszlo.
They are showing me their vision of the Web. We’re talking about Flash. They are showing me their new Laszlomail. They are selling that to ISPs. Now, that alone might look interesting, but what’s real interesting is the development framework that they are building. I’ve written about their story before.
But their story is getting much better built out. Today you write Web applications using the Laszlo system in OpenLaszlo. Here’s a tutorial. Today it compiles that app into a SWF (Flash movie) but tomorrow? They are working on AJAX and .NET versions.
So, don’t look at LaszloMail as an email client. Look at it as a new kind of Web application. I call it the higher definition Web. Coming soon to a browser near you.
The W3C Web Application Formats Working Group is chartered to develop languages for client-side Web Application development. The first deliverable is "Specification of a declarative format for applications and user interfaces":
This deliverable should be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute. The format should allow embedded program code. This format, combined with the deliverables below and existing technologies including XHTML, CSS, XForms, SVG and SMIL, should provide a strong basis for rich client application development." – emphasis mine
David was quoted in a San Jose Mercury article about "Windows Live" last week:
"More and more a user's daily experience is going to shift to the Web, off the hard drive and on to the network," said David Temkin, chief technology officer of Laszlo Systems, a Bay Area company that specializes in Web-based applications. "Instead of the Web being an adjunct to the desktop, the desktop is going to be an adjunct to the Web."
Sometimes it's nice to pull back from the technology details to remember the big picture of what the technology is for.
Prakash Singh has published a series about how to use OpenLaszlo with WAS 6.4 (SAP's J2EE Engine), on the SAP Developer Network. Part I, Part II, and "Dazzle your portal content/application with OpenLaszlo". It's short, but packed with screenshots, so if you're a visual learner and struggling to use IDE4Laszlo to develop and deploy, this could be the tool for you.
(From July, but I didn't see it until now.)
The Laszlo Mail team is too busy to toot their own horn, so I'll do it for them:
Robert Scoble writes:
David Temkin, founder and CTO of Laszlo Systems, is bragging to me about Laszlomail - a Flash-based email client. They’ve been licensing it out (EarthLink licensed it out). He tells me they just made it available for free on the Web. Looks very interesting. What do you think?
Nirav Mehta has some tips about debugging web services in OpenLaszlo.
Have been working on web services with Laszlo and I am hitting on some errors! Guess they will be helpful for anybody who’s going to use this.
He's using SOAP, with the <remotecall> tag.
Bruce Eckel is asking about OpenLaszlo. There's a lively discussion there – join the conversation!
