[Laszlo-user] OpenLaszlo 4.3 is Released

[Amy Muntz]

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.3 is available now. You can 
download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page 
(http://www.openlaszlo.org/download). It is the recommended platform for 
all application development for the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. 
OpenLaszlo 4.3 is a major release, with almost 300 bugs fixed since 
OpenLaszlo 4.2 introduced the SWF9 runtime.

For those of you who have already upgraded your applications to 
OpenLaszlo 4.2.X, no further work is needed. You should just start using 
OpenLaszlo 4.3.

To migrate your 4.0.X or 4.1.1 applications, we strongly suggest that 
you refer to this wiki page: Runtime_Differences. This page discusses 
the changes required by SWF9 and also provides a methodology for 
upgrading your application. It is very important that you run the 
automated conversion scripts in the recommended order, should you choose 
to take advantage of them.

This release also has a number of improvements, and significant advances 
in these areas:

     * Audio/Video APIs are working well in this release. Videoplayer 
and videoview now show the first frame of the video by default when they 
appear, if a URL has been set. (You can control this behavior with new 
starttime API.) Live broadcast and recording APIs are working in both 
swf8 and swf9. We have also added a new Audio & Video Programming forum 
(see http://forum.openlaszlo.org/)
     * Incubator components have been updated to work with the 4.3 code 
base.
     * A new documentation comments feature has been added, so that you 
can add an example or comment that expands upon the existing 
documentation or shows a non-obvious usage of a feature (or work-around 
for a bug that you have already filed) in OpenLaszlo. Documentation bugs 
or feature requests should be filed in our JIRA bug tracking system as 
in previous releases.
     * An improved debugger to deal with deep and circular objects when 
printing. The 4.3 release adds two new properties of Debug: 
printDepth:Number, default 8, limits how deep the debug printer will go 
into an object when printing it; inspectPrintDepth:Number, default 1, 
limits how deep the debug printer will go into an object that is a 
property of an object when inspecting. The debug printer will also 
detect circular objects (rather than causing a stack overflow), at small 
cost in overhead. When an object refers to itself (however indirectly), 
it will be printed just as its type and ID.

There is also an important change to the "this" behavior. In 4.2 and 
later, only declared attributes, i.e.: <attribute name="myattr" … /> can 
be referenced lexically (without saying "this".). The swf9 runtime will 
generate an error at compile time if you make a lexical reference to an 
undeclared attribute. For the swf8 and DHTML runtimes, the old behavior 
is supported but deprecated and may cause a compiler warning or error in 
future releases.

We would like to thank the entire OpenLaszlo community for submitting 
bug fixes and participating in discussions to help make OpenLaszlo a 
better platform. We'd also like to thank the incredible engineering team 
at G.ho.st, who have worked with us as a sponsor to bring SWF9 and many 
other improvements to the community. Special thanks to André Bargull and 
Raju Bitter for their continued and amazing support of the project. 
Special recognition goes to community contributors: Sebastian Wagner, 
Justin Clift, Ryan Maslar, Sarah Allen, and Wolfgang Stöcher. And 
heartfelt thanks to Phil Romanik, Don Anderson, Josh Crowley, and Lou 
Iorio for their tireless efforts and significant contributions.