Oliver Steele

Here are some of the weekend projects that I didn’t finish this year. These aren’t good enough to put on my project list or my sources page. Some of these aren’t even working, and some of them I might not finish at all (most of my weekends are spoken for). And some of them I can’t bear to look at (I’m not proud of the code, and don’t want to be judged by it…), but I’m making myself put them out there anyway. I feel bad for the neglected little things, trapped on my hard drive, and I’d like to let them see the sun, even if just briefly before they flicker out and die.

It was months in the conception, weeks in the making, and minutes in the configuration, but the OpenLaszlo project now has a blog.  That blog is intended for project-related news, announcements, documentation, and musings, posted by members of the OpenLaszlo project and some of our co-workers at Laszlo Systems. And I’ll be returning this blog to more personal and broader topics. (Those are two overlapping categories, not one.) Plenty of Laszlo and RIA stuff where it goes beyond the immediate project work, but more other topics too.

On a related topic, Laszlo Systems has launched Laszlo Mail, a high-polish web mail product focused on cross-browser portability and on user experience . I first wrote about Laszlo Mail here. Laszlo Mail is an excellent example of the kind of application that we created OpenLaszlo in order to enable.  As Jonathan Boutelle says :” It feels like a candy-coated swiss army knife, an appealing mix of aesthetics and pragmatic design.”

As of today, the Laszlo platform for building rich internet applications is open source. This includes everything: the server software, the client software, the examples, the documentation, the language — the whole platform. Like Mozilla, this is open source with a corporate sponsor; and like Mozilla, it’s honest-to-goodness open source — no dual licensing, no poison pill. It uses the Common Public License, listed on OpenSource.org.

After a spate of requests and a contribution from Wei-Hao Lin, I’ve finally gotten around to releasing an update of PyWordNet that works with the WordNet 2.0 database files. (WordNet 2.0 adds lexical links for derivational morphology and topical classification. This broke the PyWordNet 1.4 dictionary file parser.)

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This release also adds a module, contributed by Des Berry, for reading the concordance data; and an implementation of Lexname by Klaus Reis. I don’t know how these work, so ask for help on the PyWordNet discussion group, or from the authors.