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Laszlo: AJAX No Flash in the Pan


By Alex Handy
March 1, 2006 — 
With the announcement that IBM would be launching the Open AJAX initiative came a long list of participating companies. Among them was

Laszlo Systems, the company behind the proprietary LZX design language for rich Internet applications. The commitment is seemingly incongruous, since LZX is translated by Laszlo’s compiler into Flash code. But David Temkin, CTO and founder of Laszlo Systems, said that AJAX is at the center of Laszlo’s plans for the future.

“LZX, from a certain point of view, is all about AJAX,” said Temkin, whose company previously worked with IBM on the OpenLaszlo project. “It’s about XML transactions and JavaScript transactions on the client. This is about bringing LZX more into the AJAX mainstream. It’s getting us into conversations with other people making these AJAX toolkits.”

When LZX is compiled, said Temkin, it is automatically translated into Flash-based applications at the moment. But as the year progresses, Laszlo plans to add a second compile target for its language. While he could not give any dates for completion, Temkin said that Laszlo’s rich Internet application development language would soon be able to output JavaScript instead of simply Flash. This would allow Laszlo applications to run in any browser, without the need to install the Flash player.

“Flash is sort of like object code,” Temkin explained. “One thing we’re doing with LZX is that we’re supporting a second compile target, in addition to Flash, that will be browser-based DHTML. LZX becomes a multiruntime environment. The idea is to have this be a higher-level way of writing independent Web applications.”

Temkin said that LZX is designed primarily to facilitate the development of rich graphical Web applications, such as an overall GUI for a site. He said that Laszlo’s participation in Open AJAX is unique because his company produces a platform, not a runtime library.

“We’ve met with [the members of the initiative]. We’ve talked a little bit about things. It’s not as deep as it might be,” said Temkin of the initiative thus far. “We’ve got a parallel effort to this Eclipse tool [IDE4Laszlo] to create these different forms of JavaScript toolkit applications. It’s similar to what IBM announced, and perhaps these two will converge.”

But that remains to be seen, said Temkin. For now, he feels that the Open AJAX initiative is still in its larval stages. He also stated that the initiative is far from identifying standards.

“This Open AJAX initiative is not a standards committee; it’s really more about providing a collection of better tools and seeing what flies,” said Temkin. He went on to say that the project’s goal is “to make AJAX programming simpler and more mainstream.”


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