Today we honor St. Laszlo, Ladislaus I, King of Hungary 1077-1095. Laszlo successfully repelled many attempts to invade Hungary, encouraged Christian missionaries, and built many churches, but allowed religious freedom to the Jews and Mohammedans in his realms. While many Hungarians regarded him as a Saint many years before, it was not until June 27, 1192 that his Sainthood was recognized by the Church.

Laszlo Systems held a humble feast today in honor of Saint Laszlo. Amidst the festivities, the assembled congregation canonized St. Laszlo as the Patron Saint of User Experience.

Gartner has Laszlo Systems one of four “Cool Vendors in Application Development” for 2007. Highlights from the report…

Whereas,
* Software development remains difficult and demanding.
* The collaboration and coordination of projects is creating demand for higher levels of integration.
* Tools that simplify the process of programming by creating a higher level of abstraction may break some of the barriers for development and remain an area of innovation.

OpenLaszlo is cool because it is the only RIA platform in which developers can define the user
interface in a declarative (nonprocedural) manner and target different runtime environments,
including Ajax, Flash and Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (Java for mobile devices). Although
many vendors are using a declarative XML representation for the interface (including Adobe,
Microsoft and Nexaweb), no other vendor enables this XML to be rendered to as many different
runtimes.

Laszlo has been able to land some flagship customers, such as Wal-Mart, Barclays, H&R Block,
Time and Monster.com. It also has partnerships with IBM and Sun.

H&R Block’s new home page is a nice example of an OpenLaszlo cinematic UI. It has a clean, uncluttered design with good use of rollovers to annotate navigational choices at the top as well as providing a large amount of information in a concise presentation for the various filing options on the lower portion of the screen.