OpenLaszlo: The Flash of Linux

OpenLaszlo 4.0 provides a single application environment that supports multiple deployment runtimes.

OpenLaszlo 3.x supports Flash 7 and 8 and 9 now; OpenLaszlo 4 extends that reach to include DHTML. With the necessary infrastructure in place, we anticipate further runtimes will be developed by the OpenLaszlo community as well at by the Platform Team at Laszlo Systems. Sun Microsystems's "Orbit" project will provide compilation to the Java 2 ME enviroment, and a future release of OpenLaszlo will provide optimizations for Flash 9.


The OpenLaszlo 4 project, (formerly code named "Legals") began at the start of 2006. The official release was announced on March 20, 2007. Developers interested in helping to improve the quality of OpenLaszlo 4 are invited to contact us. Developers can get a head start on porting their applications by moving to OL4. However, some features of 3.x have not yet migrated to OL4, so not all applications can be ported.

OpenLaszlo expect the next relase, OL4.0.1, to be fully-featured.
With OpenLaszlo 4, the OpenLaszlo architecture has been remodularized into a true multi-runtime platform. OpenLaszlo uses standard ECMAScript Release 3 with some ECMAScript Release 4 extensions as its scripting language. The compiler translates this script to an intermediate language that is then processed by multiple back-ends to translate into an appropriate format for the destination runtime (e.g., SWF byte-codes, or compressed Javascript 1.4).

The OpenLaszlo runtime library has been refactored into two parts: multiple kernels containing runtime-specific code, and a cross-runtime library.The cross-runtime (portable) part of the library is written in 'extended ECMA 3' (i.e., ECMA 3 with the extensions we added from ECMA 4). The kernels are written in the native dialect of the destination runtime (e.g., ActionScript or Javascript), which really turns out to be ECMA 3 plus the destination runtime API.

The core OpenLaszlo runtime library (also called the core LFC, for "Laszlo Foundation Class") delivers a common baseline of functionality across all supported runtimes. This gives developers a rich environment in which to build full-featured web applications. In addition, OpenLaszlo 4 includes runtime-specific extensions so that the particular benefits of targeting a runtime are not lost to OpenLaszlo application developers. For example, extensions allow access to Flash's streaming media capabilities.


Note: OpenLaszlo Community will have meeting on next November 2007 as said on its site:
We are happy to announce the first European OpenLaszlo meeting which will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands on November 16-18 2007. We invite all developer interested in OpenLaszlo or already working with OpenLaszlo in Europe and around the world to join us for this meeting.

All information around the meeting can be found in the OpenLaszlo Europe group at groups.google.com/group/openlaszlo-europe. If you plan to attend the meeting, please add your name to this page (you need to join the OpenLaszlo Europe group to make changes to the page).

On Saturday there will be room for presentations, and hand-on sessions with LZX coding will held on Sunday. Looking for socializing and schmoozing? Amsterdam will offer us enough opportunities to go out and have some fun on Friday and Saturday evening. If you have any questions around the OpenLaszlo community meeting, just post them in the OpenLaszlo Europe Google group. I’m really looking foward to meeting many of our community members in Amsterdam. Van harte welkom!

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