OpenLaszlo gets more real
A year ago when Laszlo went open source - I tried to get them to invest in developing a strong develoepr community. I wanted them to spend $500k on contests, snippets, training, guerilla marketing and anything we could muster to get folks using Laszlo.
So now word comes from Oliver Steele that they work in a coffee shop and that they’re hiring.
If there was one company I recommend working for - it’s Laszlo.
And for all your indie developers out there - Laszlo is teh platform to go with - for a NUMBER of reasons.
Checked out LaszloMail - yet?
November 25th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
I have to admit I’m quite amazed at the size of the developer community so far - Laszlo has come a long way in a year. The one thing that I think would make a huge difference is lower the ‘geek threshold’ and drop a little of the ‘enterprise’ focus. Yes, OpenLaszlo is a fantastic platform to build enterprise apps on - however, I tend to think there is a HUGE missed opportunity with non-enterprise developers. Let’s face it, the next killer app isn’t coming from the enterprise space - it’s coming from some kid in an internet cafe hacking away on some crazy idea for the fun of it. And truth be told - OpenLaszlo is a hell of a lot more fun to hack around with than most other RAD tools I’ve used over the past decade (Flash I’m looking at you!).
Target the enterprise customers for the service/licensing gigs - that’s good for Laszlo Systems, but really make the OpenLaszlo community as hip, approachable and relevant to the indy developer as possible. J2EE isn’t hip, Ruby on Rails is. Zope and Plone aren’t cool, WordPress and Drupal are. Ajax (God, I HATE that term) is cool, Flash is cool - OpenLaszlo is… a poor man’s Flex?, which is Enterprise - which isn’t really cool (although MM is pushing hard here).
OpenLaszlo needs to be easy to start hacking with and quick to see results - no J2EE servlet config, edit, compile and publish needs to be super simple and options beyond Flash in the browser would make OpenLaszlo much, much more interesting. OpenLaszlo on the desktop, OpenLaszlo on your devices, OpenLaszlo on your TiVO, XBox360, etc. Runtimes, codecs, and file formats will come and go - open platforms, formats and frameworks are the glue that will allow our children and grand-children to deploy our personal, social and cultural applications/experiences long after we’re gone.
I know that may sound a little out there, but ‘multimedia’ created less than a decade ago is largely dead due to file formats (mTropolis, HyperCard), runtimes (mTropolis, Apple Media Tool), extensions (Director Xtras), codecs, and lack of financial incentive to bring these titles back. I’ve seen it cost clients more to simply update an old CD to Windows XP/Mac OS X than it did to create the original a few short years ago. Applications may come and go, but the content they contain should be able to live on and be repurposed if the incentive is there. In terms of personal, cultural and social applications - I cannot imagine a world where there isn’t that incentive.
OpenLaszlo does begin to provide a good open, expressive, GUI/client application platform/framework that doesn’t have to die at the whims of a corporation and it’s shareholders. That’s definately something to get excited about.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:46 am
[...] Marc mentioned some ideas he previously wanted to look at as ways of building the community, but personally I think all that is required is to get people talking about it, sharing their ideas and experiences. Show them what they can do with it today, and how it will save them time and frustration (in addition to money) - but even more important, it’s actually fun to work with. Word will get out! I’ve always felt somewhat inadequate popping up on Technorati with my little Laszlo widgety-slideshow thingamajigs - but you know what, they are very fast and easy to make, and just begin to scratch at the possibilities of developing applications and content using OpenLaszlo. A year ago nobody wanted to listen to me about it, today I seem to have more and more people asking me about “that Laszlo thingy you were talking about a while back”. [...]
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