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The Next Big Thing from Laszlo, OpenLaszlo 4 (OL4) codenamed “Legals”, is nearing completion and we should see a first Beta in January. This is the release of OpenLaszlo that will be able to compile to more than one runtime, allowing web developers to target either Flash or DHTML. In future versions of OL we might see more runtimes added to support Microsoft’s WPF/E and W3’s SVG and SMIL.

It will be interesting to see how web development will change in the coming year, as DHTML toolkits like Dojo, YUI, MochiKit, Google Web Toolkit, Microsoft Atlas continue to mature, Adobe’s Flex 2 continues making inroads and Microsoft’s WPF/E deployment gets underway in earnest. Meanwhile, the venerable Java Platform is still evolving, parts of it now open source and Jave SE 6 recently becoming available.

All of these are signs that seasoned web developers are finally ready to move up the tool-chain stack away from the simple text editor. I think key things to look for in differentiation between the various frameworks are:

• Tool Support: What kind of developer tools are out there to support development in your framework/language(s) of choice? From what I understand, Adobe has always been good with developer tools. On the Java side, there’s NetBeans. On the DHTML side, there’s Eclipse’s wtp. Maybe it’s time I looked into IDEforLaszlo in the New Year. Do your tools allow you to quickly and easily test and debug your code?
• Community Involvement: Not necessarily just an open source community, but a vibrant one with lots of energy and open participation. Of course, a transparent development process will help here.
• Cross-Platform Support: You need to support all of the “high tier” browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari and you need to support multiple operating systems equally. People are passionate about their browsers and operating systems. Projects need to be careful not to lose the next hot web developer to a more compatible framework.
• Ease of Deployment: How easy is it to change one line of code and deploy that change? That was always one of the beauties of the early days of the web - simply update your HTML file and save it on the server
• Beware Of Vendor Lock-In: This is going to sound very anti-corporate, but the truth is that when one company controls the toolkits and the standards, there is always the potential for that project to be shelved or neglected or dropped in favour of new ventures. This ends up taking its toll on the web developer. With open standards and open source toolkits, developers can shield themselves from the whims of corporations.

Needless to say, competition will engender a very exciting year, with the winners being the web community as projects vie for the hearts of hackers everywhere, sparking further innovation. I hereby dub 2007 as the year of the “Web Hacker Wars” - let the battle begin!

Here are a few cool bits I thought you might like. Click To Read More...

I agree with Ryan: I don’t think there is a “Google OS” product. To Google, the “operating system” is the browser, that’s why they’re putting money in Mozilla’s pockets. Too bad Google Documents doesn’t support Opera 9 yet (though if you append “&browserok=true” to the URL, you can at least create documents, not spreadsheets).

I reported many months ago that Microsoft’s Virtual Earth web app was using SVG to render path data when getting directions. At the time, I complained that Google Maps was not yet doing it, though their code looked like it supported it. I was looking for directions and decided to check it out using Firefox’s DOM Inspector - and sure enough, they are using SVG now to draw the path data in Firefox 2 (and using Microsoft’s VML in Internet Explorer).

Ironically, Virtual Earth looks like it has much more functionality, yet most of it is broken in Firefox 2 (not in Firefox 1.5). For instance, the paths are not showing up for me in Firefox 2. Furthermore, Virtual Earth seem completely broken in Opera 9 which is a significant step backwards from 5 months ago.

Via Scoble, Microsoft has updated Live Local (aka “Virtual Earth”). I took a look and was delighted to find that in the Firefox version, they are using inline SVG to draw driving directions. Click To Read More...

Looks like Google Chat has implemented sound notifications. DownloadSquad reports that “Oddly, you need to have Flash enabled in order to hear the ping”. Not exactly odd to me, as I mentioned before, there’s no nice cross-browser way to do sound in the browser currently without using Flash. Kudos to Macromedia/Adobe for being so widely deployed and useful in this context. If nimble browser development camps like Mozilla could follow Opera’s lead on implementing HTML5’s Audio interface this would be a Good Thing.