[Laszlo-dev] Relevance of SWF8 runtime for OL 5.0 / support of Flash 10?

[P T Withington]

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