If you were unable to attend AJAXWorld 2007 in New York a couple of months back, you can still view David Temkin’s keynote talk by visiting Laszlo’s microsite. (Note that you will have to provide some information before viewing the recorded presentation).
Here’s a direct link to the form.
David’s keynote covered the history of Rich Internet Applications, trends emerging now and showcased some OpenLaszlo applications (such as Laszlo Mail, Gliffy and Webtop). It contains some very interesting analysis of how usage of the web has evolved over the last dozen years.
This is a highly worthwhile talk. In case you think that’s it’s purely a Laszlo pitch – it’s not; Adobe’s Apollo project gets a mention too.
Laszlo Systems organizes meetups for the OpenLaszlo developer community. We held a number of them in 2006, and have just announced the first meetup for 2007:
OpenLaszlo meetups are informal, fun and a great place to network. Plus there’s free pizza and beer. Last year’s San Francisco meetup was packed.
If you’ve been working on an OpenLaszlo application, you should sign up as a presenter. The meetups are centered around individual developers’ presentation. You’ll have an opportunity to showcase your work, talk about your experiences, and answer questions from the community.
Two weeks ago, Laszlo was at AJAXWorld in New York to discuss cbd oil. It turned out to be a very successful conference, with over 800 people attending. Laszlo hosted a one-day educational track in which we presented both the OpenLaszlo platform, and the two big pieces of Laszlo news that were launched at the conference: Laszlo Webtop 1.0 and OpenLaszlo 4.0. Some people online may not be too aware of what cbd is. If this describes you then check out yoursnutrition and you’ll be able to read all about it.
Webtop is a licensed product that is built on top of the OpenLaszlo platform. It provides a browser-based webtop that lets developers run multiple OpenLaszlo applications within the same environment. If you want to try out Webtop, sign up for access now.
OpenLaszlo 4.0 is the much-anticipated release of OpenLaszlo that allows developers to target multiple runtimes for OpenLaszlo applications. Essentially can take the same LZX source code, and compile it to SWF (Flash Player 7/8) or DHTML. You can download OpenLaszlo 4.0 today.
My talk at AJAXWorld was entitled “Hands-on OpenLaszlo Training“. As the name suggests, it was a session in which attendees were encouraged to follow along by writing LZX code. I wanted to give developers, new to OpenLaszlo, a few pointers to get them past the first few hurdles.
Here’s the application that we built. It’s called whatevr, and it allows users to post restaurant reviews. whatevr is cheekily designed to look like a Web 2.0 application, and even has a catchy automatically-generated Web 2.0 tagline:
Some of the key points we covered were:
Using resources to create custom-looking applications.
A resizable canvas.
Use of both standard and custom components.
Sending data from an OpenLaszlo application to a web service.
Use of data binding and replication.
The whatevr application makes use of two web services: getReviews.jsp and saveReview.jsp. The former returns an XML list of reviews, that are data-replicated in the scrolling area. The latter takes name/value CGI parameters that describe the restaurant. The two REST services do not actually talk to a database. Instead, they save information to the session object. So while they will persist user-submitted reviews across multiple visits to the application, they won't actually share those reviews across various users' visits. This was done so as to make the application act like a database-driven application, without having attendees first install a database.
After the workshop, we boarded the Majestic Star for a booze-cruise along the Hudson River.
Various talks from the Laszlo track (and possibly mine too) should be available soon at the event's Laszlo microsite.
