LZX is a prototype-based language: any attribute that can be attached to a class definition, can be attached to an instance of that class instead. This is handy in UI programming, where there are a number of objects with one-off behaviors. It’s also handy in prototyping and incremental program development, where it creates the possibility for a novel kind of refactoring.
Optimizing for Broadband
Posted by Oliver
on March 27, 2004
One feature of the recent LPS 2.0 release is the KRANK feature, for optimizing application startup performance.
Laszlo Booklist Application 1
Posted by Oliver
on October 03, 2003
Laszlo Blogging Widget 1
Posted by Oliver
on August 08, 2003
Last month I did a code sprint on a blogging aggregator written in LZX. You can see the results at myLaszlo.com. There’s a screenshot on this page. 
Rethinking MVC 4
Posted by Oliver
on August 04, 2003
In the Model-View-Controller architecture, the Model is decoupled from information about the user interface. In a Data-Driven Presentation, the data contains all the information necessary to assemble the user-interface elements. These design patterns appear at first to be exclusive mutually exclusive: either the data contains presentation information, or it doesn’t. This apparent conflict is because of a confusion between the Model of MVC, and the Data in DDP.
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myLaszlo.com
Posted by Oliver
on August 01, 2003
Check out myLaszlo.com. As well as showing off some examples, this is a way of getting free hosting for Laszlo applications written using the Laszlo Presentation Server’s Developer Edition — which is also free.
Continue reading…
Pretty-Printing wth XSLT
Posted by Oliver
on June 22, 2003
I recently wrote a pretty-printer for LZX, in XSLT. Here is the source code to the Laszlo Weather application; click on “View Source” on the Laszlo Demos page for other examples.
Behr Color Center 5
Posted by Oliver
on June 21, 2003
The first third-party Laszlo application is available on the web! The Behr ColorSmart color selector is available at http://www.behr.com (as well as kiosks in Home Depots around the country, where it’s been available for several months now). It’s unreal seeing this finally go live after seeing it from the inside last year and after all the work to build the initial version of the product while this was in development — at times I felt like we were running ahead of the train, trying to lay new track before it reached the end.
Welcome Sarah Allen!
Posted by Oliver
on May 24, 2003
I just discovered the weblog of Sarah Allen, a fellow Laszlo employee. Sarah came to us in March, most recently from Macromedia, where she was Director of Engineering
Multiuser Technologies. I am told that previously she had the best title I’ve heard: Director of Director.
Sarah has been working with Adam Wolf on the Laszlo Foundation Classes. These are a set of user interface, data handling, and web connectivity components and services available to Laszlo Rich Internet Applications. Writing these takes a particular kind of wizardry: the implementation of these classes requires both very high-level skills, in the use of functional programming and meta-object protocol concepts to eke sophisticated combinatorial functionality out of a very small library size. But it’s also like writing microcode, because the speed and feature limitations of the Flash plugin require an intimate knowledge of its performance limitations and a creative ability to hack in features that it was never intended to support.
Laszlo was incredibly lucky to find in Adam someone who could combine these two kinds of programming, and we have lucked out again with Sarah in finding someone who meets the bar he set. In typical startup mode, now each of them is doing the work of five, so that Adam no longer has to do the work of ten.
Joining Laszlo
Posted by Oliver
on May 05, 2003
I first met the folks at Laszlo Systems in December of 2000, when I was the CTO of AlphaMask. A decade earlier Laszlo’s founder David Temkin, my business parter Mike Reed, and I had all worked at Apple on technologies associated with the Newton. Mike and I were in San Francisco, and David invited us by to see Laszlo.
At the time, I had been thinking of getting someone from the MIT Media Lab to design a user interface that took advantage of AlphaMask’s animation and scaling capabilities to go beyond the desktop metaphor. When I saw what Laszlo was doing, I stopped considering this. “If I ever want to do anything interesting with 2D interfaces”, I thought, “I should do it at Laszlo”.
David was interested in licensing our graphics engine, but Laszlo didn’t have any money. A year later, in October 2001, Mike and I sold AlphaMask to OpenWave. And in November, Laszlo received its seed funding. David called us to ask whether our graphics engine was still available for licensing. It wasn’t, but I was. I signed a six month contract.
I agreed to work for Laszlo because I thought the technology was amazing, and because I was looking for something to do while I decided what I wanted to do longer term —- probably start a company in the Boston area. During my first six months a couple of things happened. One was that I realized this was a real company, with a business plan and business people as good as the engineers. Another was that I really enjoyed working with everyone. So six months later, instead of leaving Laszlo to start my own company, I suggested they hire me and start a Boston office, and a year later, here I am.