[Laszlo-user] a better rich text editor for Open Laszlo 4

Mon Jul 2 09:47:26 PDT 2007

That subject line got you interested, right? “Finally, they’ve  
implemented a better rich text editor!” Sorry, but no… we want *you*  
to implement a better rich text editor.

Open Laszlo 3.4 has a rich text editor, but it’s not very good. It’s  
inherently limited by Flash Player 7’s support for rich text, which  
seems to have been designed to display rich text, not to support  
interactive text format editing. With the DHTML runtime for Open  
Laszlo 4, we’re free of the constraints of the Flash player(s), and  
into a whole new frying pan: the constraints of the browsers. There  
are lots of other projects which work in that particular frying pan;  
in particular, other development efforts have already written  
javascript-based rich text editors. (TinyMCE from moxiecode comes to  
mind.) Some of these are free, open, and cross-browser-capable.  
Combine one of those with the Open Laszlo <html> tag, and we could  
finally have a good rich text editor in Open Laszlo.

This is a good place for a community contributor; could you integrate  
an existing DHTML rich text editor into the Open Laszlo 4 platform?

To do this, you’d have to learn some cool new tricks, which haven’t  
been documented much yet: the <switch> tag, the #pragma compiler hint  
mechanism, the runtime-specific compile-time constants, and probably  
some stuff we haven’t figured out how to do yet, like including a  
third-party library. You’d help us design and develop the platform  
support that developers will need to integrate a third-party  
javascript library, and you’d implement the first dhtml-specific  
extension. And you could choose which third-party editor to integrate.

Anybody interested?

-ben

...also posted as http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2007/07/a- 
better-rich-text-editor-for-open-laszlo-4/