Laszlo Rich Internet client platform

At JavaOne '03 one of the most interesting pieces of technology I came across was the software from Laszlo Systems. They demo'ed some impressive pieces of eye-candy. I got a few minutes with one of their technologists to get a handle on what it was. I quickly got what they were going after. It leverages Flash as the client UI engine rather than a JVM or the browser. Having been down these various alternatives I could see the advantages and opportunities. They also designed an XML based declarative language for the UI with hooks for external sources of data. As they were designing the language from the ground up for their needs this could also lend to a lot of synergy but I didn't get down to this level of detail. Technologically, it looked like it would be a very useful tool in the right environments.

At the time the fact that it was a commercial product (and a variety of other issues) didn't make it especially useful for my needs at an ISV. So it sat in my giant pile of interesting things. However, times and circumstances change. For one thing, it's now open source.

Folks are always looking for a silver-bullet for their UI needs. For the last two years I've been involved in the development of a large JNLP delivered Swing app for DSS use. For some apps, this is an appropriate UI. For others, lightweight HTML is fine. As everybody knows, good webapps are hard to find and even harder to do. As a related example, the GMail team is taking a similar approach except that they're rolling their own UI engine in JS. I think that this tool might handle those medium-complex UIs. At least enough that I'm going do do some serious tire-kicking with it as time allows.