Features of an OpenLaszlo 5.0 release / future runtimes
Posted by Raju Bitter on 2012-05-14 10:49
One of the big questions for OpenLaszlo will be, how long the platform should support the SWFx runtime in future releases. As it looks now, 5.0 will have SWF11/Flex 4.6 support and some improvement for the DHTML runtime (Frank Guo is working on those changes).
Especially in the U.S. Adobe Flash's reputation has been ruined by the whole Steve Jobs Flash discussion, and the communication nightmare Adobe went through 6 months ago, when they laid off most of their Flex experts - leaving only a small core team working on the Flex SDK. Adobe promised to provide backward compatibility of future versions of Flash Player with the Flex 4.6 SDK for a period of five years.
The good news for the Flex SDK is, that the Apache Flex project is very active, and the community working hard (with support from Adobe) to release a 4.8 version of an Apache Flex SDK. A preliminary release candidate has been made available last week, and I managed to compile the LFC, the LZPix app and other demos with that version of the SDK. It even passed the Ant target "megatest", the largest automated test I'm aware of. That means, future releases of OpenLaszlo (5.1+) could be based on the Apache Flex SDK - although 4.8 will not add any new features, since it's a release compatible with Adobe Flex 4.6.
I'm not sure if we can expect any release after 5.0 from Laszlo/CP, but of course I cannot speak for the company. If you use the SWF11 runtime, things might be ok, but the DHTML runtime is lacking so many features which are supported by modern browser - but never made it into the LFC/components. IE9/10 support would have to be added at least.
What are your thoughts?
- Raju
Especially in the U.S. Adobe Flash's reputation has been ruined by the whole Steve Jobs Flash discussion, and the communication nightmare Adobe went through 6 months ago, when they laid off most of their Flex experts - leaving only a small core team working on the Flex SDK. Adobe promised to provide backward compatibility of future versions of Flash Player with the Flex 4.6 SDK for a period of five years.
The good news for the Flex SDK is, that the Apache Flex project is very active, and the community working hard (with support from Adobe) to release a 4.8 version of an Apache Flex SDK. A preliminary release candidate has been made available last week, and I managed to compile the LFC, the LZPix app and other demos with that version of the SDK. It even passed the Ant target "megatest", the largest automated test I'm aware of. That means, future releases of OpenLaszlo (5.1+) could be based on the Apache Flex SDK - although 4.8 will not add any new features, since it's a release compatible with Adobe Flex 4.6.
I'm not sure if we can expect any release after 5.0 from Laszlo/CP, but of course I cannot speak for the company. If you use the SWF11 runtime, things might be ok, but the DHTML runtime is lacking so many features which are supported by modern browser - but never made it into the LFC/components. IE9/10 support would have to be added at least.
What are your thoughts?
- Raju
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2 Comments
By bitwalkerjapan@gmail.com on 2012-05-19 14:10
Regarding the future of OL and runtimes, I think that the developer resources we have at hand are pretty slim and that has to be factored in. In the survey more people said they wanted HTML5 runtime improvements(though it was pretty even), and the HTML5 march means Flash is going the way of floppy disks. I don't see any need to continue development for the SWF platform other than bug fixes. My own OL use is primarily with the SWF platform, and what we have works fine.
HTML5 however needs a lot of work. I personally think we should focus on speeding it up, trimming it down and "borrowing" components from other projects with compatible licensing.
By Raju Bitter on 2012-05-20 11:22
Communication with Laszlo/CP: The only person I have been in contact with is Frank Guo, who's working for Laszlo in China. But Frank would have to speak for himself on a possible release date for OpenLaszlo 5.0. Forget about the current management, I'm not willing to waste more of my time talking to them. During the web-based community meeting we had earlier this year Sarah Allen said, that Chris Helgeson (VP of Engineering) welcomes any community contributions. I haven't heard anything regarding the SWF11 runtime contribution I've been working from anyone but the engineers in China, and it took Laszlo in the U.S. more than a week to execute a simple "svn branch" command to create a branch for me to check in my code.
For everyone with legacy OpenLaszlo apps, if you plan to use the SWF runtime only, you can just continue to use the existing version - and maybe some community members will be wiling to fix bugs.
HTML5: OpenLaszlo could still be a very attractive HTML5 app platform, but a lot of work needs to be done. I doubt that the current community or companies using OpenLaszlo are willing to invest money or time into a project, which has not been maintained very well. The only chance for a future LZX HTML5 app platform is to fork OpenLaszlo, but without some sponsoring or funding that is going to be a very difficult task. Most former Laszlo employees I've been in contact with have made it clear that they are not willing to contribute to OpenLaszlo any more, since they were very frustrated by what Laszlo did with the open source project and community.
That means: we have to fork the project, or there won't be a future for OpenLaszlo. Are we all willing to invest quite some time to be able to use LZX for building HTML5 apps?