OpenLaszlo Working to Support Flash Player 9 Runtime

Posted by Jon Rose on Jan 14, 2008 10:57 AM

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OpenLaszlo is working to support the Flash Player 9 Runtime. OpenLaszlo was one of the first application development frameworks to target the Flash Player Runtime (starting with version 7). Since that time, the Adobe Flex framework has surged ahead in adoption, partly because of their support for the Flash Player 9.

In June, 2006 Adobe released the Flash Player 9 runtime. Flash Player 9 is a major enhancement over the previous version, including a brand new virtual machine for ActionScript 3 - featuring a Just In Time (JIT) compiler for translating ActionScript bytecode into native machine code.

The OpenLaszlo team described their efforts in a blog last week:

There are a lot of new and improved APIs provided by the Flash 9 runtime; better media loading, data loading, and network APIs, as well as much more rational imaging and event model. We can probably take a lot of advantage of these by updating and optimizing the swf9 kernel and the runtime to use this where possible.

Henry Minsky, the author of the blog, explains in a comment on the post the level of effort to target the Flash Player 9 runtime:

Yes, it’s funny but the jump from AS2 to AS3 is actually more of a leap than it was to go from AS2 to DHTML! But the benefits are large, we’re hoping to see some great performance improvements in the Flash 9 runtime.

The Flash Player 9 runtime actually includes two virtual machines, one for running code that targets version 9, and a second for SWF movies that target older versions. So, that may in part explain the large gap between AS2 and AS3, as it is an overhaul of the ActionScript language.

For more details on the OpenLaszlo – Flash Player 9 effort read more on their project blog. Also, for more details on the Flash Player read on at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/.

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   Components

   Jan 14, 2008 11:50 AM by Matt Giacomini

   Disclaimer: I have not written an application from the ground up in OpenLaszlo. Part of the reason that we decided to go with flex as opposed to openlaszlo is the component model. There are a lot of really good professional looking components in Flex 2.x and 3.x, that allow you to get going very quickly. I know you can do the same with OpenLaszlo, but it looks like you have to spend more time skinning the components to make the look professional. Anyone out there that has expirence with OpenLaszlo 4 and Flex 2 that can comment on this? Also does OpenLaszlo have functionality equivalent to Flex's data providers and bindings? I have this to be a great feature of Flex. I love the idea that openlaszlo can display in both flex and dhtml, and maybe other platforms in the future. Very cool.

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   Re: Components

   Jan 14, 2008 3:19 PM by Jon Rose

   OpenLaszlo integrates the backend with XML over HTTP. It doesn’t implement the AMF protocol used in Flex Data Services (now BlazeDS). So, there is no simple method for exposing POJO’s. The backend needs to translate everything into XML for consumption by the Laszlo application.

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