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

[Raju Bitter]

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
>
>
>