Great OpenLaszlo Review by Greg Yardley
So Greg Yardley saw something I wrote up on Laszlo and he went and took a look.
He finds many of the ‘limiting factors’ of Laszlo directly because of their reliance on Flash. Watch for this to change. Can I hear you say “Vi-Vi-Vi-Vi-Vista?”
[via Peter Caputa]
September 1st, 2005 at 6:26 am
I remain unconvinced.
What will Vista give us that removes these limiting factors? Won’t any reliance on Vista-specific features be at least as bad as a reliance on Flash? Why aren’t we supporting something more open, say… SVG? Do we really need all the bells-and-whistles that Flash and company provide? Personally, I doubt it. Frankly, I’ve yet to need any of them for any of my web projects. Admittedly, that may change if I ever find myself needing to do media playback, but virtually every other application of Flash seems to me to either fall into the category of unnecessary, or overkill.
Full disclosure: I’m a Mac/FreeBSD user.
February 21st, 2006 at 10:59 pm
OpenLaszlo doesn’t currently support SVG, because SVG is dead. If it came back to life for some reason, and became as popular as Flash, DHTML or Vista, then it would be another story. But Adobe was holding it up as a competitor to Flash, and now that Adobe owns Macromedia, SVG is a lost cause. Don’t blame me — I love SVG! I wish it won, but it didn’t. The first nail in the coffin was when Mozilla 1.0 came out and broke Adobe’s SVG plug-in (because Mozilla changed their plug-in API without revving the GUID of the interface), so Mozilla hard crashes whenever you visit a web site with SVG. Don’t waste your time telling me about the Firefox partial implementation of SVG, because it’s nowhere near complete. Yes, I know about Batik, but it won’t run in the browser as an applet because the Rhino JavaScript interpreter conflicts with the browser security settings, so it’s out of the running too.
The whole point of OpenLaszlo is to insulate you from platform dependencies. The fact that it uses Flash today is as incidental as the fact that GCC supported the proprietary Vax instruction set in its early days — that was what was popular at the time. But a C compiler is meant to insulate you from the instruction set, not tie you to it, just as OpenLaszlo is meant to insulate you from Flash or whatever runtime it targets. Flash is just the ideal runtime today, because it’s already installed on 98% of all desktops (including Linux), and it works perfectly and identically across all platforms. Can SVG hold a candle to that?
The next important runtime that OpenLaszlo is targetting is DHTML, not SVG. There are many more DHTML based browsers than SVG, and DHTML is never going away, just getting better.
-Don
August 1st, 2006 at 4:54 pm
SVG’s not dead yet!
Now that we’re deep in the DHTML kernel, it’s so easy to write a new runtime target, that I did an SVG kernel in a weekend!
http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2006/07/notes-on-writing-a-new-openlaszlo-kernel-svg/
Well, OK, it’s only partly implemented, but jesus, you don’t need a lot more to make a fully functional kernel.
Basically the runtime has to implement the new LzSprite class, which has to be able to display basic graphics, text, and handle mouse clicks and user input fields. I’ve got all that except for the input text, which won’t work in SVG 1.1 very easily.
Then to round out the kernel, you need image loading, xml data loading, and that’s about all.
I have always loved SVG since I first saw it, and I will not write it off yet, not now, not ever!