Is the OpenLaszlo DHTML runtime production ready?

As a long time time Flex developer I've thought about building my next application - which should run on the iPad as well - with OpenLaszlo. OpenL开发者_Go百科aszlo offer a Flash and DHTML runtime, but besides the demos on the website I don't see any real world application built with OpenLaszlo: http://openlaszlo.org/showcase

Has anyone built a large application with the DHTML runtime, and what was your experience doing that.

Thanks!

I've tested our complicated video editing application under HTML5 mode of OpenLaszlo (formerly known as DHTML mode) and everything works aside from the text mis-aligning a bit. Audio and Video playback is not available in the latest official release (4.9.0) but the latest nightly builds ( http://download.openlaszlo.org/nightly/trunk/ ) contain the html5video and html5audio classes which work fine for media types that play in the new HTML5 and tags (different browsers support different ones). My test results of what works can be viewed here:

http://jira.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-10058

In regards to iPad, everything seemed to work fine except that it was not possible to programmatically play more than 1 video/audio item at a time without user interaction. However, this seems to be a limitation of iPad and not OpenLaszlo since a test HTML5 application suffered the same limitation.

http://www.pandora.com and http://www.gliffy.com are large applications built on OpenLaszlo Framework.

The DHTML runtime (or the ability to generate an HTML5 application, as we'd probably phrase that feature today) has been added to OpenLaszlo with 4.0 release in March 2007. The first time I saw a version of Laszlo Webtop running using the DHTML runtime was in mid 2009, although Laszlo Calendar wasn't working at that moment. In March 2011 I witnessed a much improved version of Webtop running in DHTML mode, the system looked very stable.

In July 2012 Gliffy announced the Gliffy HTML5 Editor Preview. Gliffy is an online diagram editor, which has been around for a number of years - but in the past it was only running as a Flash application. Gliffy is a very complex application with a large code base, and it's a good sign that Gliffy is able to run on the DHTML runtime. I haven't found any information on the Gliffy website to which browsers are supported by the HTML5 preview.

Based on this information I would say that the DHTML runtime is production ready. The only question is if Laszlo or Critical Path (the company which acquired Laszlo) is going to keep funding the project in the future, since the number of developers working on the platform at the moment is very low.

Laszlo has not upgraded the HTML5/DHTML runtime to support the newer version of IE (IE9+), although it seems that the company is working on improving the DHTML support for IE at the moment (as of summer 2012). If you are planning to use the DHTML runtime for only some browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), everything should work relatively well.

If you plant to develop an OpenLaszlo application using the DHTML runtime, I'd recommend that you use the Trunk version (upcoming 5.0 release) of OpenLaszlo, since a lot of bugs have been fixed in Trunk for DHTML.Despite the fact that it hasn't been released, a number of developers are using that version already for production purposes.