Attending the webinale 07, the German business conference on web technology. Today, I saw many interesting things, one pitched out, a technology that existed for many years, and now, given semantic web 2.0, gains value.
Its OpenLaszlo, a framework to program user interfaces. I met Raju Bitter, the community manager of Laszlo, a kind of Laszlo evangelist.
OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.
OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.
OpenLaszlo is “write once, run everywhere.” An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.
The interesting things for us Semantic Web people is:
- The guis are described in an XML language, similar to XUL or HTML … or similar to Fresnel (aha!)
- They run the XML guis in an Laszlo Interpreter … like Adenine/Haystack
- They GUIs are rendered either in DHTML or flash
- The whole data model is XML … why not RDF/XML
My assumption is that the framework takes, like any framework, some time to learn and train your developers, some investment, etc… but when I look at user interfaces like Jibberjims FoafNaut, I would guess they could also be hackeed in Laszlo, and better extended….
What was your favorite Web 2.0 application and why? You can discuss this with people who would like to try these new apps! Submit your favorites at http://www.listio.com!