Flash's market saturation has led to an explosion of interactive content throughout the Internet. But for every industry standard, there is a free alternative - the trick is getting people to look. Let's take a look at OpenLaszlo.
First, a rant about Flash:
Flash content is only valuable if it is absolutely necessary. Used with discretion, Flash can add a lot of functionality to websites, but unfortunately it is frequently misused. Flash is too heavy, slow, and complicated for most purposes. Even with fast internet connections, there are way too many sites that require the user to wait (0%... 10%... 50%... %80... 99%..........) while it loads. But Flash is what students learn in school, and so many young developers learn how to do really cool things with Flash, and then end up making their entire website with it. And Flash is pricey too. Once these students leave school, they'll need to shell out $700 to develop with it.
If professors start teaching OpenLaszlo alongside Flash, the students could use that $700 toward paying back their college debts, and the internet might be less bogged down with unnecessary interactive content.
OpenLaszlo isn't a direct 100% replacement for Flash, but its limitations may be a hidden bonus, limiting the "interactivity" of the content to only what is required. You can't make a movie with OpenLaszlo (nor should you with Flash).
You may have heard of the excellent online music player Pandora - it uses OpenLaszlo. In fact, Pandora is responsible for a lot of the increasing awareness and interest in OpenLaszlo. Heck, even Walmart is jumping on the bandwagon. OpenLaszlo now supports SWF8 and SWF9 as well as browser-independent DHTML (no Flash Player required!).
The best way to get started is to download and install it (JDK required), then go through their very straightforward introductory tutorials. You'll be off of Flash and developing new web apps with OpenLaszlo in no time at all. Just promise to use it sparingly.
Download latest version:
OpenLaszlo v4.6.1
| Homepage: | http://www.openlaszlo.org/ |
| Supported OS: |    |
| Portable version: |  |
| 64-bit version: | |
| Active project: |  |
| No strings attached **: | |
** No spyware, ads, nags, registration reminders, etc.
