It has been a couple of years since my last post.

Open Laszlo, while it did what I wanted, I ran into a problem when they did an update, forget the versions, I switched from and two, but was running into a problem.

Well, I did get an updated copy installed on Fedora 10, but the machine had a tendency to shut down. Suspect it was a bios issue with a machine designed for home entertainment, and not as a server. So it would decide to shutdown on it's own if it wasn't being used. Not something a server should do. Picked up a netbook and installed Ubuntu 9.04, and got Open Laszlo installed, and working, then installed it on a different machine running XP.

One thing that you need to be aware of is the Tomcat that is delivered with Open Laszlo, is an older version. You have trouble the current Vanilla Tomcat, and the Tomcat for Open Laszlo, because the value of the environment variable CATALINA_HOME needs to be changed depending on the version you use. This needs to be done from Control Panel, system environment variables. Unquestionably inconvenient for XP. No problem on Linux.

Well, Tomcat is running on my laptop. I can disconnect from the internet, and the OpenLaszlo web pages are still being served.

All right. I mentioned that one of the things that attracted me to OpenLaszlo is that it allowed you to create a .DHTML document, and you didn't need to have flash installed on your machine.

Well this is true to a point. Minor detail I didn't realize, call me ignorant, is the dhtml refers to the
OpenLaszlo service that is running. What this means is you have something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
lz.embed.dhtml({url: 'hello_world.lzx?lzt=object&lzr=dhtml',
bgcolor: '#ffffff', width: '100%', height: '100%', id: 'lzapp'});
lz.embed.lzapp.onload = function loaded()
{var s = document.getElementById('lzsplash');
if (s) LzSprite.prototype.__discardElement(s);
}
</script>

Which means a whole bunch of OpenLaszlo needs to be installed on the server which services the web pages, as opposed to the SOLO application. When I attempted to select SOLO, even though I specified .dhtml, the resultant web page still contained only .swf files.

Another minor detail, it generates pages for flash seven and flash 8, but I know there were some serious problems with flash that were fixed with flash 10, and I don't know what will happen if you try to run the resultant .swf with flash 10. I know I should install flash 10 before I start commenting, but the point of this exercise is to learn about OpenLaszlo, and if installing Flash 10 breaks something, I'm up a creek.

Taking a look at some of the javascript files, I have to admit that I am impressed with the work the OpenLaszlo team has done. There is really a lot of stuff there.