New RIFERS blogs entries from Geert Bevin in category laszlo

Laszlo in Action hits the shelves

Geert Bevin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:43:47 +0000

After many months of editing and fine-tuning, Manning finally published Laszlo in Action, the first comprehensive guide towards OpenLaszlo besides the reference documentation.

I received a final copy through DHL yesterday. Norman Klein and Max Carlson really did a great job explaining the technology behind this vast RIA framework, and it has been a pleasure to review several chapters of the earlier drafts.

I'm sure this book will make it much easier for people to develop with OpenLaszlo as it clarifies some of the lesser known intricacies.

Wrong assumptions about OpenLaszlo

Geert Bevin — Tue, 08 May 2007 07:37:22 +0000

After reading a blog post about choosing RIA frameworks, I can't help but think that OpenLaszlo is not really seen for what it is and a lot of wrong assumptions are abound. Even friends of mine on IRC need clear clarifications about OpenLaszlo's direction and features.

The first one is about OpenLaszlo's support for multiple runtimes. Contrary to Java it doesn't intend to be Write Once Run Anywhere The multiple runtimes however allow you to have exactly the same architecture for building different applications or different parts of the same application. Some things are better done in DHTML (internationalization, accessibilty, native feel, font rendering, execution performance, memory footprint) and others are better done in Flash (video, music, multimedia, rotated fonts, high amount of animations, ...). You can reuse a lot of your code and most of it does work across runtimes, which is a nice benefit. I encourage everyone to try out OpenLaszlo's DHTML engine, it's quite impressive even at this first stable release status.

This brings me straight to Flash support and the apparent fact that Flex and Laszlo are at least on equals footing here. Some people actually seem to think that Flex has the edge since Adobe controls Flash too. In reality however, Flex only runs on Flash 9 while OpenLaszlo runs on Flash 7, 8 and 9 and does proper optimizations for each specific version.

A last one I regularly hear is that people seem to have an adverse reaction to the fact that XML is used to declare the UI. Strangely, I rarely hear people complain about (X)HTML being XML. In fact, it turns out that for describing user interfaces, a declarative XML approach really works extremely well. I admit it, initially I had a problem with the XML approach too, until I started actually working with it. Now I wouldn't want anything else. It allows for some pretty neat class libraries and reuse. In some applications even, I generate the Laszlo XML through XSLT from a data model. This is pretty powerful. Also, I much prefer Laszlo's Javascript than Flex's Actionscript. It is a lot closer to what you write using DHTML and just feels consistent and right.

I hope this will shed some new light on OpenLaszlo for you. The project deserves some decent attention, instead of dismissing it as a supposedly poor clone of Flex (btw. OpenLaszlo exists much longer than Flex).

Article: Breaking OpenLaszlo loose from XML data

Geert Bevin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:27:10 +0000

TheServerSide published my article that explains how to uses OpenLaszlo with non-XML data, most notably JSON. It contains a short self-contained example of how to asynchronously retrieve the data, without triggering the XML parsing routines.

Currently this is still primitive since it doesn't tie into the data-binding infrastructure. There are however plans for the dataset facility to be better abstracted, creating a uniform approach to interacting with structured data. Until then you're still able to explicitly update the view elements that you need by applying the techniques that are outlined in this article.

Read the article here.

Pandora : the ultimate internet radio?

Geert Bevin — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 08:27:13 +0000

I looked at Pandora more than a year ago when it just launched but I stopped using it since you were required to pay a yearly subscription fee to continue listening beyond the initial free hours. I liked the idea a lot though. They have a huge catalog of tagged music and are able to select songs for you based on your taste and preferences. This can be done in several ways, you start off by providing a number of artists or albums that you really like and Pandora starts playing immediately. As you listen to it, you can give each individual song a thumbs up or thumbs down, or just let it slide by. All this influences the decision-making process for the next songs. In the end you create your own personal radio station. You can configure up to 100 of these, which means that you can easily set up different ones and listen to them depending on your current mood. A QuickMix feature also makes it possible to get more variety since it will mix all your radio stations on-the-fly as some kind of über-station-with-stuff-you-like.

I recently decided to take a look at it again and noticed that they switched to a banner-based income model with a subscription for those that don't wont to see any advertising. This is awesome, since for all intents and purposes, Pandora is now free to use. Additionally, it they have increased the audio quality of all their music to 128Kbps which makes it sound great!

Pandora is also spot on with the Web 2.0 community approach since you can share your radio stations. Feel free to listen to G.Bevin's Radio. Note that this will not play what I'm currently listening to, it will select music for you based on my musical taste.

I'm using it with the MacOSX DeskBrowse utility, which neatly slides away into the side of the screen. Most of the time, Pandora is invisible and I only slide it in to give my appreciation of the music that is playing.

I'm curious to see if Pandora will replace my preferred internet radio station, Radio Paradise, or if the computer-mixed radio program will start to bore me. I'm planning on using it for at least a few days to see how it goes ...

Bla-bla List is blooming

Geert Bevin — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:29:36 +0000

A year after its initial version has been launched, there seems to be a sudden uptake in the interest in Bla-bla List. This month it started getting around 200 new subscriptions per day and people are sending in regular donations to help the project and the free service.

Yesterday I was totally baffled though when I looked at my Google Adsense history. Since the uptake, the site makes me consistently $20 per day in bannering revenue. This is amazing, since the application itself doesn't contain the slightest trace of a banner, they are only present on the gateway site and the information pages.

I suppose that people are finally getting ready for Rich Internet Applications. This is perfect timing since I have great plans to enhance Bla-bla List further and to embark on a series of adventures with OpenLaszlo and Laszlo Systems. More about that later, when everything is finalized in that area. Let's just say that if you have OpenLaszlo experience, live in Europe and are looking for work, shoot me message, we might have some positions opening up in the coming weeks or months.

OpenLaszlo without Flash

Geert Bevin — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:39:12 +0000

OpenLaszlo has announced their first alternative runtime: DHTML!

While this has not been released to the public yet, they did publish a demo application that has been compiled to both the Flash and the DHTML runtimes. It's amazing how much alike they are, even the cinematic effects!

Congratulations on this wonderful development, I'm looking forward to a preview release of this in May so that I can start looking at it and contributing wherever I can. This might be an excellent opportunity for me to get back into DHTML coding. A lot of the layout principles of my old RelativeLayers project apply to OpenLaszlo, and of course the latter does so much more!

OpenLaszlo 3.1 released, it's AJAX now!

Geert Bevin — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 14:49:57 +0000

Last week, OpenLaszlo 3.1 has been released without much noise.

Ajax-flavoured

I'll talk more about the new features below, but one stands out in particular: they added a XMLHttpRequest class.

This is interesting, since it blurs the line between Ajax applications even more. Considering that the recently released ZK framework is called an Ajax/Xul framework, I'd say that with the introduction of this class, OpenLaszlo is now 'worthy' of the Ajax label too.

The funny part is that this new XMLHttpRequest really is more of a publicity stunt than anything else. It is less powerful than Laszlo's standard asynchronous datasets approach, as is gently suggested in the release notes:

For AJAX style applications, there now is an XMLHttpRequest class. This class implements XMLHttpRequest as specified by the WHATWG consortium.

XMLHttpRequest() implements the functionality of the <dataset> tag in a syntax that is more familiar to people with AJAX programming experience. If you are comfortable using datasets there is no reason to use this class.

Bla-bla List updates featuring in-place editing

Geert Bevin — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 14:06:10 +0000

Bla-Bla List has been a huge success: almost 4000 users, more than 5000 lists with 25000 entries. Being featured as New York Magazine's Best Daily Bet did the service a lot of good and since then there are constantly new registrations.

I thus decided to iron out the last small issues I found and add a few nice features. The official and packaged 1.0 release is very close now.

This is the overview of what's new:

in-place editing of list name, description and entries (click, edit, confirm)
totally rewritten drag & drop for a smoother experience and more a intuitive feel
fixed some discrepancies in the server-side implementation according to the published REST API
mouse-wheel support on Windows and Linux (Flash doesn't support this on MacOSX yet)
minor interface and text changes according to user suggestions
upgraded to latest OpenLaszlo version

Have fun with Bla-Bla List! If you haven't yet, try it out, it only takes a few seconds to get started.

Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up

Geert Bevin — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:14:44 +0000

I talked numerous times with people about which platform to adopt for RIA development. While I never have been a huge Flash fan, I've been continuously saying that using it instead of Ajax is still the best solution and that OpenLaszlo's choice of Flash makes a lot of sense.

Just look at the innerHTML Gotchas blog post over at ajaxian.com. Some weird compatibility problem with Internet Explorer makes it impossible to dynamically add rows to tables. Can you believe that? It's not like adding table rows is some esoteric capability that nobody would ever use. This is just one of the many compatibility problems. To me, all this smells like the DHTML flop from 6 years ago all over again, except that they're doing it asynchronously this time .

It's simple, people, unless you have infinite resources (like Google), building a complex RIA using Ajax will just make your development team drown under the 'odd little compatibility problems'. And, after all the effort, you'll still target less users because the adoption of 'supported browsers' is less than the install base of Flash player 7.

Bla-bla List is New York Magazine's Best Daily Bet

Geert Bevin — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:46:07 +0000

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw hundreds of new Bla-bla List subscriptions during the last hour. I even wondered if someone had written a bot that abused the REST API for some reason.

As it turns out, New York Magazine has an article about Bla-bla List on their homepage and even mailed it as their Best Daily Bet to all their subscribers.

For all those anti-flash people out there, the following quote from their article:

There are other competing to-do list services on the Internet, but Bla-bla List has by far the most elegant design and coolest functionality, thanks to its use of Flash technology (which works on most browsers, on both Windows PCs and Macs).

Thanks a lot for your nice article New York Magazine, I'm sure your readers will find our tool useful!

JIA slides and examples available: "The Server-side Architecture Behind OpenLaszlo Applications"

Geert Bevin — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:50:53 +0000

My presentation last week at Java In Action entitled "The Server-side Architecture Behind OpenLaszlo Applications" went very well.

For those that attended it or that are interested and couldn't make it, I put the slides and the example code online:

Full quality Keynote presentation (13,37MB)

Full quality QuickTime movie (73,62MB)

Medium quality QuickTime movie (7,29MB)

Static PDF document (0.88MB)

Ready-to-run example archive (12,49MB)

I made a couple of changes based on the comments that I received after the presentation, it should be a bit clearer now for people that don't know what MVC is (yeah, it seems that not everybody does).

What's next for Rich Internet Applications?

Geert Bevin — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 11:33:38 +0000

Face it, the scope of web applications is expanding. Text-based information sites will still continue to use regular XHTML, but a lot of new application types are appearing now that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are a reality.

Personally, I'm standing behind the open-source OpenLaszlo platform. The main reason is that consumers are adopting computers and the internet for most of their multi-media needs. Nobody finds it weird anymore that you listen to music or watch a movie on your computer. Portable music players like the iPod go hand-in-hand with desktop applications to manage them, applications for home-recorded movie editing are included in most operating systems and Apple's Garageband brings awesome audio creation power to everyone. OpenLaszlo allows you to write RIA that incorporate sound, music, images, video and text easily, just look at what Pandora has done.

JIA conference is drawing nearer

Geert Bevin — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:07:01 +0000

Orlando is the place to be in three weeks! On October the 5th, the Java in Action conference will take place there. TechTarget invited me as a speaker several months ago thanks to my work on the RIFE web application framework and Bla-bla List, an open-source to-do tracking written in OpenLaszlo on top of a RESTful architecture.

My presentation that has been accepted is "The Server-side Architecture Behind OpenLaszlo Applications".

I had a great time creating the presentation slides last week and am eager to talk about this topic at the conference. I'm starting with the explanation of a common approach for maintainable Rich Internet Application architectures and gradually narrow it down to OpenLaszlo, explaining its strengths and weaknesses. At the end I focus on some pitfalls and good practices to make you more productive in the creation of your OpenLaszlo applications.

I'm particularly excited to finally meet some of my internet buddies in real life. I'm also very happy that my friend and associate JR Boyens will be writing some summaries for TheServerSide about JIA. We will thus finally meet after all these years of working together.

It's going to be three exciting days! See you there!

I'm now officially a Laszlo contributor!

Geert Bevin — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:08:40 +0000

Today, I received an email from Amy Muntz of Laszlo Systems announcing me that my scrollinputtext component has been integrated in the Laszlo 3.0 incubator.

I'm now also listed as an official Laszlo contributor ... nice!

... now if they would only get it ported to another runtime than Flash, I would be using it all the time ... an Ajax version would be very sweet!

First Laszlo integration in existing site

Geert Bevin — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:18:30 +0000

A few weeks ago, one of our customers wanted to have real-time TV listings on their site. The currently airing program always had to be shown together with the one that follows. This information is provided by another company through pushed XML streams. Every time the information changes, we receive a new XML file on our server through secure copy.

I wrote a trivial scheduler task that picks up the last one of those files every five minutes and stores it straight into the RIFE content management back-end. This made it very easy to always provide the latest version of the information from the same URL.

Writing the Laszlo application was extremely straightforward. It fetches the XML directly from the server and lays it out automatically thanks to Laszlo's excellent data-binding features. Since the information is higher than the available height, I let the content pane scroll as soon as the lay-out is finished. When the scrolling is done, the application fetches the latest XML again, lays it out ... and round and round it goes.

I had one minor problem that was related to Flash's weird rounding habits. This caused the icons and the text to not be in sync and slightly fluctuate. It was quickly solved with the help of Henry from Laszlo Systems. He didn't hesitate to look at my code and pinpoint the problem. I just had to add the pixellock="true" attribute to the data bound view.

All in all it took me a couple of hours to write and the application is only 70KB in size! The customer is very satisfied and it was a pleasure to develop. I'm sure that I'll be reaching for Laszlo more and more for this kind of functionalities.

This is the result: