Oliver Steele

Laszlo Systems has a position open for a senior software architect to work on the OpenLaszlo client runtime. This is a paid position, and you would be working on an open source project. You’ll be working on the bright green box below, but if you qualify, you get to choose your color.

You should be a great software designer, able to navigate complex systems and big architectures, but with wizard-level performance optimization skillz too.

Your idea of a dream job should be writing code that does near-impossible things, and shipping it, and then seeing it used to build products that you can show your friends. But you should also enjoy working with other smart people, bouncing ideas off of them, learning from them, and teaching them. In fact, you should be willing to mentor and lead the efforts of open source contributors, and you should have the leadership and communication skills to do so.

You should enjoy initiative, innovation, and excitement. You’ll be working on the core technology of an emerging technology company. This is an important, visible position, that will change the future of the web.

You should enjoy building complicated things, and making them look simple. You should be excited about working on systems that look like this on the inside:
but look as simple as this to developers:

<canvas>
  <button onclick="animate('x', 100, 1000)">Click me!</button>
</canvas>

and can be used to build things that look like this to your mom:

You don’t need to know Smalltalk, Lisp, Dylan, JavaScript, Python, or Ruby — and you won’t be using any of them except JavaScript — but if you’ve tried dynamic languages before and hated them, you probably don’t want this job either. Conversely, if you’ve never profiled an application or made an educated performance-based decision about whether to use integers or floats, recursion or iteration, or DTO or parameter lists, you should probably look elsewhere too.

You should live in one of America’s Bay Areas (San Francisco or Boston).

You can read more about this position here and here. Send your resume to resumes@laszlosystems.com.

Last month, Geert Bevin wrote an article called wasting time with Laszlo. Since then, he’s wasted even more time with Laszlo. Bla-bla List is Bevin’s fully functional clone of Ta-da lists, re-implemented in Java and RIFE.

Of course, while the bad thing about web application programming is that you’re dealing with two different platforms (even if one of them is just DHTML), the good thing is that you can choose them independently. I’m planning to use Laszlo on the client with PHP and Rails on the server, now that serverless deployment makes that possible.

Update

In OpenLaszlo 3.0b2, two weeks later, Bevin updates his original list of criticisms to take into account the 3.0b2 release. Recommended reading for anyone evaluating RIA platforms.

The slides from my PyCon 2005 talk about Jython and the OpenLaszlo compiler are online (PDF). I’ve corrected some dates and minor typos: 3K+1.5K does not equal 6K, as I realized once I was standing at a podium with a large slide that displayed my math skills behind me, and a large number of technically sophisticated smart people in front of me.

Some illustrations from the talk:

KRANK dataflow

Dataflow for implementation of the KRANK feature for startup time optimization:

Script compiler dataflow

Dataflow for the OpenLaszlo ECMAScript compiler:

(The PDF shows what the data looks like at some of these stages.)

Serverless deployment

Deployment diagrams with (top), and without (bottom), the OpenLaszlo server. Deploying with the server requires a J2EE servlet container (Tomcat, JBOSS, Weblogic, Websphere, etc.). Serverless deployment works with Apache and consumer-price ISPs (such as the one that hosts this website).

Deployment with OpenLaszlo Server

Serverless Deployment

(Caveat: the server also handles caching, GIF transcoding, RPC, and the persistent connection, as this animation illustrates. The diagram above just shows the initial download.)