Introduction

Welcome to AJAX and Flash Development with OpenLaszlo: A Tutorial. This book teaches you OpenLaszlo, an exciting technology for writing AJAX and Flash applications. AJAX, for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is slated to be the technology for developing the next generation of Web applications. Flash, as you likely have known, is a popular technology for writing highly interactive Web applications that normally involve movies, animation, or games. More appealingly, unlike Macromedia Flash that costs a few hundred dollars, OpenLaszlo is free and open-sourced, licensed under the Common Public License (CPL) version 1.0 (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl.php). Authored by IBM, CPL provides flexibility for commercial reuse of source code. No wonder companies like Yahoo, Earthlink, and many others rely on OpenLaszlo as their development platform.

OpenLaszlo comes with an Application Programming Interface (API) that includes built-in classes and a rich set of user interface components. These classes and components allow you to draw shapes, create animation, lay out components, bind data, communicate with the server, make movies and games, and do practically anything a mature programming language would allow you to do. With the OpenLaszlo suite at your disposal, you have everything a rich client programmer has ever needed. In addition, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for rapid OpenLaszlo development is available through the OpenLaszlo Eclipse plug-in.

The rest of this introduction discusses AJAX, Flash, and OpenLaszlo. It also prepares you with prerequisite software installation and provides an overview of each chapter in this book.