The first in the 'Crossing Borders' series of articles by Bruce Tate has been published at developerWorks. It gives a good overview of the benefits of Rails' Active Record approach to persistence.

The second part of the article compares it with Java persistence engines and introduces RIFE as a promising alternative. RIFE's persistence engine hasn't received a lot of attention in the community and it's nice that it's slowly starting to get noticed. Combining it with meta programming through Constraints makes it extremely powerful and it's even able to handle content management and transforming transparently for you.

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!