Laszlo Systems Open Sources Rich Client Platform

cying writes "Today, Laszlo Systems released their entire rich internet applications platform (standards-based, zero-install, all-singing / all-dancing) under the CPL. Check out their cool Laszlo-powered web site and see some rockin' groovy demos. Also, read the press release, news, and blogs; download the goods; and join the community."

Interesting

I've never heard of this company or project, and Firefox is being sluggish in getting the plugin for the site, but a platform like this could really be useful to the FOSS community.

It's just Flash?

I browsed their website a little bit but had a hard time trying to figure out why I would want to use Laszlo over just directly using Flash.
There are plenty of "rich" web interfaces built using Javascript and Flash. Does Laszlo make this easier somehow? I tend to think that installing and configuring yet another server, learning another XML syntax, and figuring out how to work around the nuances and bugs is more difficult (in general) than just directly using the base language.
I'm not trying to slam the product. As a web developer, I would just like to know why I should be interested.

Apparently, it's not just flash

http://www.davidtemkin.com/mtarchive/000001.html [davidtemkin.com]

According to that, it's an actual "language", wherein as you would write C++ and compile it to a machine executable format, you code in LZX, which is then compiled into SWF bytecode.

Initial knee-jerk negative reaction: suppressed

Take what I say here with your usual Slashdot-comment grain of salt because I've taken only a brief look at this thing.

From the download [laszlosystems.com] page:

Why Laszlo?

Deliver a new generation of rich Internet applications for today's Web:

• Develop in XML and JavaScript (Try it now!)
• Deploy via any Java servlet container or J2EE application server
• Display in any Web browser enabled with the Flash 5 player
• Open Source platform, free for development and deployment

Okay, so this is just a way to great Flash GUI's. My initial reaction was "BLEH! I can do that already with Flash."

What gave me pause was that this was a impressively sophisticated [laszlosystems.com] way to create Flash GUI's using Open Source tech. Macromedia's expensive authoring tool is not required. Everything is driven by XML+JavaScript from the server side.

So, yeah, it's just a server-side Flash generator. It's also one of the more sophisticated Open Source Flash creation tools I've seen yet. So there's that.

Zero install my foot!

Can't do anything on their site without shockwave, if that's zero install, then I don't care to use it... Someone port wxWidgets to dHTML...

Anyway...

deceptive summary

Anyone else suspect the summary intentionally didn't mention this thing is Flash to try and gain some credibility? Since Flash is most often used for annoying ads I had to go enable it just to see what the site linked was trying to show. Next I reflexively tried to gesture open a bunch buttons into tabs - nothing happened of course since you can't use that on Flash. Next I tried to click the big "The new Web experience" main graphic in the flash - nothing happened. Great, brightest thing in there and it's not even linked to anything. Even on cnn.com, a primarily text based site, I still gesture over the graphics that accompany a story link when they have them. It's more natural to focus on what grabs your attention and a bigger target (and cnn has a clue so they are linked).

So next I try to tab around to see what is clickable and of course that just skips the flash part of the page entirely even though that has the main content. All this time the flash of course ignored my text zoom settings - my grandmother loves using that and a user stylesheet I made for her to ease website use so this would have been a very big no go for her. I notice it's hard coded to a certain resolution as well in the swf's object tag, so you can't use say a PDA with low res or change your browser window's shape to read it while doing other things as easily.

Is a way to make crappy websites like the above really something to get excited about? Ignoring all the problems it took me like 3-4 clicks to drill down to some actual information about Laszlo (first I tried sample, but that wasn't right, then I saw the get info thing which isn't even a real button, but a label next to a button making it less usable, then I had to deal with some stupid email popup when I clicked on a pdf I wanted - too bad the browser can't kill lame Flash popups like it can real ones, would nip that part of this bad site design in the bud - and then finally it opened it up some information). Anyone writing a standard webapp who buried main content that far would be fired, but with Flash this poor design is somehow OK since it's all about pretty crap and not access and usability anyway.

Making your website into a veritable font of data for use however your viewers want is all the rage right now. Wrapping all your content up in a hard to access, proprietary technology entangled, annoying ad engine like Flash is not a good thing to do. Having an XML backend doesn't do shit if your people spend all their time screwing around designing a bad interface that looks a little prettier than the standard web ones like they did here instead of say adding a XML or RSS button so I can quickly get their data/updates later, an HTML view maybe generated by XSLT, another view for PDAs, etc. like they should have been doing.

Standards based...

...rich internet applications platform (standards-based, zero-install, all-singing / all-dancing)

Last time I checked, Flash was not a web standard in the true sense, was still a proprietary technolgy and you couldn't redistribute the player (so it can't be bundled by your favorite distribution).

Pretending that this product is standards-based is like saying MSOffice is standards-based because it can import/export XML.

Are we to expect a future release supporting SVG - as the backend seems to be modeled around XML/ECMAScript? That'd be most impressive - and web engine friendly, at last.

Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers [ptaff.ca]?

Not data-driven

I would not consider it data-driven, as it is being advertized. Simply retrieving data from a server is not data-driven. A true data-driven rich client would at least implement a kind of transaction mechanism that would allow you to edit the data.

Flex for free?

Interestingly enough, Macromedia is busy pushing it's own XML-based J2EE web application framework for creating "Rich Internet Applications" (read: flash guis) on the fly. It's called Flex [macromedia.com] and it starts at (are you sitting down?) twelve thousand dollars. Then again, before Laszlo saw the light at the end of the all-powerful, pixie-dusting, open source tunnel (i say PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE SCREEEEEEEN!) they were apparently running at 20K per server license.

On the surface, Laszlo seems to have a lot of things going for it (especially now that it's free) - after all, Flex is still *very* 1.0 - but the rub seems to be that (so far) Laszlo works with Flash Player 5 ("or better...") whereas Flex works with Flash player 7 (the latest and greatest). I know many people around here think flash is just a technology for displaying annoying animated ads and intro screens, but flash player 7 has some very... very... interesting capabilities in terms of "data remoting" (as they call it) and handling all kinds of multimedia content that you can't do in Flash 5. Basically (real quick pundit point here) it looks to me like Laszlo had a good little party going, but now they hear the ominous sound of Flash's parents coming home. Competing with Macromedia on the Flex-Flash axis using a closed source model would be like competing with Microsoft on Windows-.NET using a closed source model: you would need some very very deep pockets.

All in all, good news for us, we get a) some new free toys to play with and b) some pressure on Macromedia to develop more flexible Flex pricing. BTW: when you download Laszlo, there's a page listing all the third party stuff in there: it reads like a rogues gallery of apache/jakarta xml and web app stuff (and i mean the stuff like Batik) along with some nice surprises like RelaxNG. The ultimate proof of the pudding is in the eating, so there goes tomorrow evening.

Re:Flash required makes it a nonstarter

Gecko only makes XUL a nonstarter.
Sad but true.

I like your XUL based Amazon demo BTW. Laszlo has one kinda like that here [laszlosystems.com].