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.