San Francisco Meet Up Update

Last Thursday Laszlo sponsored a developer meet up at Cellspace in San Francisco, CA. Laszlo Systems pays for the space, pizza and beer at these events, but the real content is provided by developers from the OpenLaszlo Community.

• Gordon Tian, from myDecide presented DecisionStreet, an application that helps seniors and their families make important life decisions. There will be a publicly-available demo on the company’s site soon. Gordon took my Laszlo Training classes some time ago. By the time the classes were over, he had completed a fully-functional prototype of their application. It was impressive to see Gordon’s progress each morning at the start of class (he’d work on his application in the evenings), and I was thrilled to see the completed application now.
• Vandana and Manoj Gunwani from Technizant presented Tuhee and Koolvite. Tuhee is an e-greeting application, with a full drag-and-drop UI. Tuhee lets the user create and send greeting cards using standard templates, clip art, text and user-uploaded images. It integrates with Flickr/Yahoo photos too. Koolvite is an e-invite application that’s built with OpenLaszlo. It uses the same drag-and-drop interface as Tuhee for creating custom invitations, so the user has more control over their appearance than they do with, say, Evite. You need to create an account in order to use Koolvite, but you can create and send cards with Tuhee just by browsing to the site.
• Michael Hayden from genAcode demonstrated LZadmin, a database management product that uses OpenLaszlo with Ruby-on-Rails to design databases. OpenLaszlo provides the administrative interface. There’s a generally-available demo on genAcode’s web site.
• Eugene Ciurana from LeapFrog gave an excellent presentation on why his previous employer (a very large e-commerce web site) decided on OpenLaszlo as their RIA technology of choice. Unfortunately, Eugene wasn’t allowed to disclose the name said employer, but I suspect that it’s Walmart.com, since they’re a very large e-commerce web site, who have deployed OpenLaszlo applications across their site.
• Jon Carlo Gueco from Saven Technologies showed off an impressive set of financial charting components that he built in OpenLaszlo. The charts are loaded with features: stock-comparison overlays, draggable time-axes, plot options, zooming, etc. There isn’t a live demo, but I’ve posted a screenshot of the zooming interface below:

From the Laszlo side, Max Carlson demoed various runtimes of OpenLaszlo 4.0, including a peek at LZPix running inside of J2SE. This is part of Project Orbit, a Sun and Laszlo collaboration to enable OpenLaszlo applications to run on the J2ME runtime. David Temkin presented Laszlo Webtop, which I’ll write more about soon.
Stay tuned for details of the next meet up!