Scott Delap provides an overview of Swing and Eclipse RCP technologies in today's world of RIA applications, as well as advances in deployment techniques such as Java Web Start and Pack200 which assist in the centralized deployment of desktop apps. Scott also compares when to use Java vs. other technologies such as Ajax, Flex, and OpenLazslo.
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.
Laszlo Systems continues to carve out their niche in the RIA space with growth in the end user, developer, and customer bases for OpenLaszlo. In addition, they have strengthened their product suite with their recently announced enterprise offering, Laszlo Webtop.
Laszlo Systems has announced the release of OpenLaslzo 4.0. OpenLaszlo is an open source RIA platform that allows developers to compile and target their applications to either an Ajax or Flash runtime.
OpenLaszlo is starting off 2007 with a beta candidate of version 4 of the OpenLaszlo platform. This is a significant release as it includes a new DHTML runtime target in addition to the previously available Flash based runtime.
Adobe has recently released a beta of Flash Player 9 for Linux. This allows Linux users to view sites that make heavy use of Flash like YouTube, Yahoo Maps Beta, and InfoQ's own Flash based interviews and presentations.
OpenLaszlo has teamed up with Sun to extend their platform to also compile J2ME apps. The goal of becoming a multi-platform runtime platform was first announced in June, when OpenLaslzo announced Legals, which would provide cross-browser pure DHTML as a compile target in addition to Flash.
The OpenLaszlo project has had a lot of attention in the Java community, being one of the first solutions for building rich internet applications via compiling XML apps into Flash SWF files. OpenLaszlo has released their first preview of OpenLaszlo Legals which can now compile RIA apps into DHTML.
