“Sun Microsystems and Laszlo Systems, Inc, have announced that they will be working together to enable OpenLaszlo applications to run on devices supporting the Java™ Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) application platform.”

This will leverage the OpenLaszlo multi-runtime architecture to enable OpenLaszlo apps on mobile devlces, bringing AJAX-style programming with declarative XML for building GUI applications to J2ME. You can read more details on openlaszlo.org. Since this is open source initiative, there’ll be more info posted as the project evolves.

It is great to see the first OpenLaszlo book on the market. The book presents straightforward tutorials which do a good job of introducing the LZX you need to know to build simple applcations. If you are someone who really likes to have a physical book rather than on-line documentation this book will give you a good foundation in learning OpenLaszlo. When introducing new classes, the book provides a graphical class hierarchy to illustrate how the class fits in. In addition to the basics, Chapter 15 details a Google Maps application by Manabu Togawa which provides a good real-world example of browser integration.

There’s a nice zdnet article about cooqy, an eBay site developed using OpenLaszlo by Robert Yeager . “After taking a look at AJAX, Flash and traditional web development platforms, he settled on OpenLazslo. According to him it was because it was a mature product as well as free and open source. OpenLaszlo’s elegant XML-based programming model was a big plus and made for rapid development. Cooqy went from nothing to core functionality in 4 weeks of part time work.”

I found the app compelling, and imediately got sucked into shopping-mode by the “photo collage” view. It must be a very successful application where I can get distracted by my usual analysis of the UI and Web 2.0-iness of it all to instead be enticed to actually *use* the application :)

I’m thinking of buying a few pounds of legos: