Latest developments at Laszlo Systems

Laszlo Systems just announced a Series C funding round of $8 million. They like us! They really like us!
Meanwhile, I've been working on an implementation of CSS for OpenLaszlo. Adam Wolff and I have been doing the work in a developer branch, coal. Our CSS implementation is planned to be released as part of OpenLaszlo 3.4. Unlike the bone-deep changes to DHTML programming paradigm with the adoption of CSS, the dominant paradigm for writing OpenLaszlo applications will still be to write lzx classes and scripts. OpenLaszlo, unlike DHTML, was designed from the beginning to be a presentation and interaction language, so it has far fewer empty spots to spackle over with an additional syntax layer than did pre-dynamic HTML. CSS will allow for themes, skinning, and a smoother designer/programmer collaboration workflow.

• We're supporting a big subset of CSS 2.1 selectors: element type, attribute selectors, id selectors, and descendant selectors, while leaving out .class selectors, sibling selectors, pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes.


• CSS rules are evaluated at construct-time to determine attribute values for any attribute of any node (just about).


• We have introduced style constraints to specify how to map CSS style properties onto lzx attributes; these are much like the $once, $always, and $path syntaxes already present in OpenLaszlo.


• There is compiler support for CSS, which feeds the runtime CSS engine.