[Laszlo-dev] Cross-runtime feature APIs, cross-runtime scripting

[Raju Bitter]

With the increasing focus on Ajax/DHTML - going in hand with nice new HTML5 features - the evolving W3C standards are going to have a strong influence on the LZX APIs in future versions of OpenLaszlo. Until now SWFx and AS2/3 have been the runtime providing many more features for OpenLaszlo than the browsers' JS engines. That's changing right now, and the question is: How is OpenLaszlo going to incorporate the HTML5 APIs into LZX? Take Flash SharedObject (https://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/net/SharedObject.html) and W3C WebStorage (http://www.w3.org/TR/webstorage/) as an example: How are we going to create APIs providing those features across runtimes?

If there similar functionalities in SWFx and HTML5/W3C standards, are we going to create a common API for - using the example of local storage - key-value pairs in DHTML using WebStorage, and duplicating that behavior in SWFx using SharedObject functionality? Or is the focus going to be on open standard based features which will be accessible from within SWFs through SWF->JavaScript calls?

A powerful feature would be the capability to define the runtime environment for a method/script as an attribute to the method or script. Imagine code like this inside a SWFx runtime app:

  <method name="storeNote" runtime="javascript" args="id,title,body">
    // Some JavaScript code using the WebStorage API to store a note
    // This method would be turned into a JavaScript function inside the browser
    //  Any call to this method would be passed from the SWF app to the JS function 
  </method>

If the same app is compiled as DHTML, passing of method calls would not be necessary. I'd be interested in hearing what you think, or what your ideas are for OL apps using many of the new JS/HTML5/W3C features.

- Raju