I’ve been hearing a lot about Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime; formerly known as Apollo), so I decided to give it a try.
“What!” you say, “Isn’t Adobe AIR a product that threatens OpenLaszlo – the lifeblood of the company (Laszlo Systems) you work for?”
Actually, no. It turns out that Adobe AIR plays quite nicely with OpenLaszlo. You can take an OpenLaszlo application, and compile it to a .air installer. Your application can continue to function, just like it did via a browser. Only now, instead of having to fire up a web browser, the user can start the OpenLaszlo application from their operating system. There’s no download time involved. Here’s a shot of the OpenLaszlo Weather application running on my desktop:
Here’s the OpenLaszlo AIR installer for the OpenLaszlo Weather application. To install this application on your desktop, you’ll need to download and install the AIR runtime. Note that the installer is zipped for portability.
I’ll post more detailed steps on how to create your own OpenLaszlo AIR applications soon.
The Link to the app is not working for me… I really want to blog about this, but I want to try it first.
Thanks for letting me know Ryan. I’ve corrected the link; you should be able to download the app now.
THis is from a discussion on debate between OL and Flex. Special thanks to Nate.
Khurram
http://www.geniteam.com
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I can probably give a generic, lightly opinionated comparison:
First of all, you may or may not know that the new Flash 9 player
actually includes 2 distinct runtimes, one for the new Actionscript 3
and one for the traditional Actionscript 1 and 2. Actionscript 3 is
part of a complete rewrite for Flash, and includes an amazing increase
in performance and drawing capabilities. Check out the PaperVision 3D
project for a bit of history and an example of the AS3 performance
improvements over AS2. (specifically in 3D – http://blog.papervision3d.org/
– if you haven’t seen this yet, you will be amazed.) One other cool
new feature of AS3 is it’s ability to work directly with binary data.
AS3 supports a new ByteArray class, which has proven useful in
creating libraries for generating PNG, BMP, GIF, PDF etc. files
dynamically from inside the Flash player. The only problem I see with
the new AS3 (Flash 9) is the market penetration numbers aren’t going
up as fast as I’d like to see. (
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penet…
)
The only difference between AIR and Flex 2 is AIR deploys to a desktop
application, and has 2 additional features (last time I checked): A
browser control, and local file-system access. AIR also comes with a
very nice install/upgrade/uninstall tool that works automatically once
the AIR runtime is installed.
Anyways:
* Both Flex 2 and Laszlo have basically the same component set, an XML
language for page layout, and use Actionscript for application logic.
* Both provide basically the same server integration possibilities
(XML, SOAP, etc.) with the following exceptions: Laszlo’s LPS is free,
works well with Java classes. Adobe’s FDS is free for single-processor
configurations, otherwise 10’s of thousands of dollars – also works
well with Java and has RTMP capabilities. There are 3rd-party server
applications for integration as well – for example WebOrb for .Net,
Java, or Ajax.
* Flex 2 compiles to Flash/AS3 exclusively, while Laszlo compiles to
either Flash/AS1/AS2 or HTML+Ajax.
* Both have open-source compilers and languages.
* Component development in Flex 2 is more complicated than Laszlo, but
provides a more intelligent/optimized approach to property and visual
updates, also leading to improved performance.
* Both provide advanced data-binding features in their XML layout
languages.
* Adobe’s IDE (FlexBuilder) is about $500, plus $300 for the charting
features. I believe IBM developed an Eclipse plugin for Laszlo (free,
but a bit out-of-date I think), and I currently use Dreamweaver tag
extensions for colorization and tag insight (also free, but my copy is
out-of-date).
Thanks for the fix Antun… the app seems to work great, but the weather data isn’t coming up for me… it keeps defaulting to San Francisco, CA and 55 degrees. Is this just test data?
I’m getting that too. Of course, the first time I tried it, I actually input my San Francisco zip code, so I didn’t notice anything wrong! The weather application connects to a service on the Laszlo corporate website: http://www.laszlosystems.com/cgi-pub/weather.cgi?zip=94107 . That service HTML-scrapes weather information, and it hasn’t been maintained for a long time – I guess that last time it broke, someone must have made it default to stock data for San Francisco. If you enter “nerds” instead of a zip code, it will return other data.
Hey Khruram,
Thanks for posting.
This point: “Both Flex 2 and Laszlo have basically the same component set…” is incorrect. OpenLaszlo and Flex have very different component sets. They have different names, appearances and capabilities. Here’s a link to a sampler of the OpenLaszlo component set:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/lps-latest/examples/components/style_example.lzx
Take care,
Antun
Nice work antun,
I am not sure the app demonstrates the what people would really desire from Air and laszlo, what would be really cool is to be able to call AIR APIs directly from laszlo code (which your app is not really doing) and I am not sure that is probably possible until maybe laszlo starts compiling to Flash 9. If that is possible, for me that would be the killer.
Anyways nice work done to show a start of integration of Apollo and laszlo.
Hey Kayode,
Thanks for your feedback. Can you elaborate a little specifically on what functionality you believe people are looking for? Is it the offline capabilities? The next thing I’d like to try is a windowless application – which I think will take some digging, but may be possible without Flash 9 compilation.
-Antun
Cool stuff! I’ll be watching to see how the chromeless version goes.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Hey Ryan, Thanks for stopping by. I’ve successfully built a chromeless version, and blogged about it: http://www.antunkarlovac.com/blog/?p=50
Can you create a version of this and the Instructions which might work with Beta2?
It’s frustrating that Beta1 applications won’t load in the Beta2 runtime- I’m sure that once they hit 1.0, they’ll stabilize the format, and provide long term support, as they’ve done for the Flash versions.
By chance, is there a Flash9/AS3 version of OL in the works?
“I’ll post more detailed steps on how to create your own OpenLaszlo AIR applications soon.” Could you please please please show us how its done? I really need to learn how to do this.
Cool Stuff.
Wondering if you still have plans on publishing detailed instructions?
Hey Vivek,
Yes, I still am planning to post instructions. I have been slammed these last couple of months, so I haven’t had time to sit down and work through this.
Should be really soon.
-Antun
Hey Colin,
To answer your question about a SWF9 version of OpenLaszlo: Yes, there is. The big deal with the OpenLaszlo project now is full DHTML support and stability.
You can see the roadmap here: http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Platform_Roadmap
The DHTML stability effort is called Ringding. Parts of the SWF9 project have been under way since last year, but as far as I know there isn’t a prototype available yet.
-Antun
Hey all,
I’ve uploaded some instructions on how to compile AIR apps from OpenLaszlo SWFs. Thanks for being patient!
http://www.antunkarlovac.com/blog/?p=63
-Antun
Can you try to update the featured .air file about so as to be able to install in the current Air Update software.
The file seems to be outdated
Hi Olayode,
Thanks for letting me know that the example is broken in the latest AIR runtime. I haven’t looked at this in a while.
I’m not sure if you have come across it, but I wrote a post with step-by-step instructions on how to take an OpenLaszlo application and turn it into an installable AIR application. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for:
http://www.antunkarlovac.com/blog/2008/02/19/writing-an-openlaszlo-air-application/
-Antun