OpenLaszlo

I found OpenLaszlo recently and I am definitely intrigued. Laszlo (which I continually misspell Lazlo) carries the tagline an open-souce platform for rich internet applications. I think it definitely fits that description from what I’ve seen.

Laszlo is powered by a language called LZX, the Laszlo XML language used in the software, and is definitely simple to use. Since it’s XML powered and formatted, you can interface a Laszlo application with many others seamlessly (or nearly). At the moment, Laszlo applications generate a Flash web application. Of course, my friend Kalle took one look at that, and decided that it would be against his current Flash boycotting to entertain the idea of using it. However, by the end of 2006 they will fully support a choice between output as ActionScript/Flash or a JavaScript/Ajax implementation. They have joined arms with Dojo and are including the Dojo toolkit to implement their Ajax option for coding.

For coders, usually the best way to tell if something is for you is to look at the code, and they have a great showing of it. You can go to their Laszlo Explorer page and take a look at the Laszlo in 10 minutes guide. It not only gives you active code to play around with, but it shows you exactly how simple it is.

If you are further intrigued, you can take a look at a development environment created just for Laszlo applications. It’s called IDE for Laszlo (yes, I know someone should have consulted their creative marketing department on that name) and it’s put together as a joint project of IBM and Laszlo. The IDE is much like any for a visual programming language, and is downloadable for Windows, Linux, and Mac users.

Overall, I think that it’s a very interesting application framework, and one that has lots of potential — particularly when it’s opened up to include full Ajax options.

~Nicole

One Reply to “OpenLaszlo”

  1. Unfortunately the there is no release for Laszlo IDE for a long time, and the one available did not prove to be quite stable, but I hope they wont give up.

    Spelling Laszlo is quite simple if you know that ‘sz’ is one letter in hungarian and it is prononunced like a single ‘s’ in english.

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