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. 
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.
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:
I first heard of Ruby at the second Lightweight Languages Workshop 2, where Matz and I were both speakers. This was first public disclosure of the then-proprietary Laszlo platform language. I’m afraid I was more worried about preparing my talk then listening to Matz at the time!
Since then, a number of different people have expressed interest in both Laszlo and Ruby. I figured I had finally better take a look at it.
Laszlo’s main office is in a spiffy office building in San Mateo.
But Boston Product Development (basically, the OpenLaszlo development team) works out of a cafe.
This puts us in good company. (And we get better coffee, too.)
Last month, Laszlo Systems released the Laszlo platform as Open Source. The intent was to to remove the bottleneck in the virtuous cycle of software development.
Today IBM alphaWorks released IDE for Laszlo. This is an Eclipse-based IDE for creating, editing, debugging, and testing applications written in Laszlo.
An A Fresh Canvas I argued that there’s a human-factors advantage to allowing an XML document to contain names from multiple namespaces without requiring namespace prefixes on the elements from all but one of them. In What’s in a Namespace I looked at how namespaces and namespace imports work in programming languages, which generally allow both qualified imports (like XML Namespace) and unqualified imports as well.
I also said that I would demonstrate that unqualified imports could be added to XML in a well-defined way, if certain conditions were met. (The conditions are that the set of names in each namespace is known when the document is processed. This is the same condition that programming languages such as C++ and Java, that resolve the namespace of unqualified names at compile time, impose.) Here’s where I make good on that promise.
Last week I discussed the fact that “namespace hygiene” — the use of XML namespaces — would cause a simple Laszlo program such as this one:
[code language="xml"]
[/code]
to balloon to the following mixture of namespace declarations and namespace prefixes:
[code language="xml"]
Dave Hyatt has been taking some heat for introducing new HTML tags into the set of tags supported by Apple’s Dashboard. Read the post that started it here. Eric Meyer and Tim Bray take issue with the proposal here and here, and Hyatt responds here.
As the author of an XML-based presentation language, this is an issue dear to my heart. Like Dashboard, LZX is intended for the creation of cinematic interfaces — HTML-embedded applications that are more interactive and have a design esthetic beyond what can be achieved with portable HTML+CSS. And like Dashboard, LZX applications leverage current browser technology.
