OpenLaszlo DHTML-based Runtime Preview Release

I'm quite surprised that this information is not out yet in other well visited information sources. Well anyway, since it has not, I'll announce it myself instead. OpenLaszlo has released a preview of its product code named 'Legals'. Named after a restaurant chain who's slogan is "If it isn't fresh, it isn't Legal!" The final release is expected by the end of 2006 according to the project plan. The big feature about this release is that it can now compile to DHTML (reported to be based on the dojo toolkit ) rather than Flash SWF.

From my experience working with Laszlo, the main drawbacks of its use of Flash was the speed of the javascript interpreter, the bulkiness of SWF files, its memory footprint, the lack of rudimentary layout capabilities like creating borders and finally difficult to debug encoding to communicate with the server. One could easily become suspicious about its scalability in the wild. Fortunately, Pandora the widely popular music service employs Laszlo technology and this in some sense validates its scalability.

The primary advantage of Flash was that you didn't have to worry too much on browser incompatibilities. I do have my fingers crossed hoping that this feature of Laszlo will be carried over to the DHTML version.

It'll also be very interesting to see how one could integrate the results with Google's GWT. I really have to be perfectly honest, the XML based approach that Laszlo takes although makes it easy to quickly whip together prototypes, can get pretty unintuitive for more complex server based interactions. Furthermore, one can't seem to separate ui component encapsulation and the code required to act upon it.

After playing with it for a couple of minutes, its unclear if anything works of yet on the DHTML side. Oh well, looks like I'll have to wait till September for the developer full feature release.