the short story
Phew. After a month or so of hard work, we’re demoing an early alpha of Laszlo’s new DHTML backend at the etech conference in San Diego.
Check out our first example piece - a flickr-browsing photo application. I wrote the data-handling chunk of the app. Search for lzpix and look at the whole gang who put the little app together. Don’t have the Flash-player because you’re an open-source linux zealot? That’s okay. A relatively-new build of Firefox should be good enough.
Then come work at Laszlo. We can always use a few more great engineers and designers.
the long story
One of my first comments when I started working on v1.0 of Macromedia’s still-unnamed server (now called Flex) was “Hey, this is a cool idea - writing code in MXML, which is abstracted away from Flash’s ActionScript API, means that I can write code that can potentially be compiled into multiple different runtimes!” At the time I thought that Java was the only strong contender for an alternate runtime for my markup. Alternate runtimes for MXML still hasn’t happened.
One of my first questions after I left Macromedia to go work at Laszlo Systems was “Hey, what is this ‘alternate runtime’ that you mysteriously alluded to during my interviews? Java? DHTML?” It turns out we hadn’t yet developed the compiler to run applications developed in LZX (Laszlo’s XML+ECMAScript language) in multiple runtimes. I was bummed.
But now we’ve done it. You can write your code once, compile to SWF and run the results in the ubiquitous Flash player. Flip a switch (actually, append lzt=dhtml query parameter to your url or use a command-line argument to lzc), compile to DHTML and run the results in a browser natively. That’s right. LZX to AJAX, pure and simple.
Of course, we’ve still got a bit of work to do - optimization, rounding out the feature-set supported by the compiler, a bunch of stuff. But the results are pretty darn impressive. Not bad for a month’s work, eh?
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