Laszlo Systems continues to carve out their niche in the RIA space with growth in the end user, developer, and customer bases for OpenLaszlo. In addition, they have strengthened their product suite with their recently announced enterprise offering, Laszlo Webtop.
See Laszlo’s growth numbers from Laszlo Systems July 16th, 2007 press release:
Laszlo technology reached a record high, serving 40 million people monthly in the U.S. alone during the first half 2007. The company also announced that its customer base, now in the hundreds, continued to grow at a strong pace, while its global community of developers increased to over 75,000 members.
Laszlo Webtop is a commercially licensed product which is similar to Adobe’s LiveCycle Data Services (formerly Flex Data Services), as it provides enterprise quality infrastructure and facilitates interactions between an OpenLaszlo application(s) and the J2EE server.
From Laszlo Systems’ March 20th, 2007 press release, Laszlo Systems Introduces Laszlo Webtop:
Laszlo Webtop supports the scalability, security and reliability requirements of mission-critical deployments inside and outside of the enterprise. Laszlo Webtop is an extensible framework that allows seamless integration of pre-built and custom built applications. It also features a Java-based server that enables easy integration of Web Services and fits well into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Another key feature of Laszlo’s Webtop is the ability to integrate a number of different applications and allow them to interact with one another. David Temkin, co-founder of Laszlo described it this way to techworld.com:
"These applications [in the Webtop framework] all have to be OpenLaszlo applications. That's how we get the tight integration and performance," said David Temkin, co-founder of Laszlo Systems. "There's a lot of interoperability. ... Elements of one application can be dragged into other applications, just like a real desktop. You don't get that integration normally on the web."
See the following for better understanding of the Laszlo Webtop architecture: http://www.laszlosystems.com/software/webtop/architecture
On the OpenLaszlo technical front, Znet’s Ryan Stewart sees some interesting possibilities worth watching if OpenLaszlo is able to add support for Silverlight and JavaFX.
If OpenLaszlo could add reliable support for Silverlight and JavaFX, I think a lot of people would stand up and take notice. That would be a huge engineering feat, but itÂ’s worth keeping an eye on.