I wanted to make sure everyone caught this.

In the midst of their big announcements yesterday, Laszlo announced their......

Laszlo Presentation Server Non-Commercial Edition

Laszlo Presentation Server Non-Commercial Edition (LPS NC) is intended for organizations that would like to build and deploy applications for non-commercial educational and research purposes as well as non-profit organizations providing information for public benefit. LPS NC is also ideal for Laszlo developers and partners looking to showcase and promote Laszlo applications.

Support

LPS NC is supported via Laszlo's online forums. Access to the forum is free and available to all Laszlo customers. It is monitored by Laszlo's technical staff and enables you to get answers and exchange ideas with other customers, developers and the Laszlo team.

Pricing

Subject to acceptance of an application form, LPS NC is free. It is intended for organizations using the product for non-revenue generating purposes.

Apply For NC Now

If you are interested in LPS NC, please submit a completed application form to Laszlo for review:

Download LPS NC application form (PDF format)

For additional questions about the Non-Commercial Edition, contact getnc@laszlosystems.com.

Marc's bit...

As long as it's non-commercial - you can do it - for free from Laszlo.  The Internet Archive is using it.

11:19:38 AM    

Once Again...I Don't Get Laszlo

Posted by Dan Shafer Mar 25, 2004 10:20 am

Here's my reply to Dan (who's an old friend BTW)

Hey dude,

OK - here we go. Here's a specific situation that's going on right now - which should give you the idea of how Laszlo would be used.

Look - it's good enough that Macromedia is copying them so it can't be all THAT bad.



So Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has what may be or is becoming the world's largest collection of public domain, on-line content. The BBC is making much of their content available and there's all sorts of illegal/shared stuff - but this stuff is legally OURS - ephemeral, historic, artistic, educational, rocking materials - for us all to use. Audio, video, photos, you name it.

The only problem is that it's all hidden behind this butt ugly HTML interfaces and not readily available and useable by us humans. The endusers. But it CAN be accessed and made available via XML.

The Internet Archives has built in support for sending XML to the Laszlo SoundBlox player - and they only had to write that code once. The End-user goes to a page of some specific music, speech, soundtrack, whatever. They bring up the Laszlo SoundBlox jukebox - which then accesses the XML of that music - which (of course) just points at the files on the hard drive.

End-users today click on the URL of the file or a link pointing to the URL of the file - but what's wrong with this picture? ONLY NERDS DO THAT!

Humans use things called jukeboxes. They specify the name of the song, the artist and usually the length of the song. These jukeboxes usually have things called playlists (lots of songs sequenced in a particular order.)

All thjis requires a user interface which the programmers at the Internet Archive can program - but quite frankly they're not designers.

So two things are going on a) they're utilizing a reusable object - and plugging XML into it and b) they're able to use their programming skills to do this - without learning how to program vis a vis a timeline based authoring enviornment.

 

I know this may like heresy coming from the guy who helped crerate timelines in the first place - but time moves on.  There are about 1.5M people who Macromedia timelines, 6M who buy Photoshop and that number is not going to grow substantially.  It;s just to esoteric of knowledge for others to learn.  Too high up teh pyramid

 

But Dan I don't have to tell you that Javascript and scrpting in general has really taken off and that there are 10's of millions of scriptors out there - who know ECMA 2.0 related languages (which Laszlo is an XML o-o variant of.)

I hope you see how this situation is happening times 10,000 across the world of enterprise. Sure animated, interactive ads can and should be authored with timelines - but there are these new webapp, rich media what-sah-ma-callits that are now possible - now that broadband is here - and that ain't gonna happen with timelines.

11:19:13 AM    

Wanna build a rich media application or service? getting tired of HTML? Don't wanna learn timelines? Then check out Laszlo Systems.

All non-commercial uses get a free license! [Marc's Voice]

11:17:53 AM    

Here's some great insights into how Laszlo is optimizing their platform.  You won't find these techniques in Macromedia's copycat.

Optimizing for Broadband.

One feature of the recent LPS 2.0 release is the KRANK feature, for optimizing application startup performance.

Normally, when a Laszlo application launches within a browser, it runs initialization code that creates view and logic objects, binds them to dataset data,and attaches constraints. Some of this initialization depends upon the context of the application launch (query parameters, and the contents of runtime data and media requests). Much of it is the same each time the application is launched.

KRANK launches the application once on the developer's machine, stops the launch process after launch-context-insensitive application state has been created, and snapshots the state of the application at this point. It then uses this state information to create a new executable that reproduces the same application state, but with instructions that optimally create the same memory structures that the original application created by running general-purpose code. This produces an application that is typically larger than the original application, but reaches the point of first user interaction up to six to eight times quicker, because fewer instructions are executed.

This feature is similar to the Windows hibernate feature, where the operating system saves its memory state to disk before turning off, so that it can resume with the same state. It's different in that KRANK snapshots a reusable state that can be run on a different machine (in that respect it's more similar to operating system work on process migration), and that can be restarted multiple times and reapplied to different contexts (in that respect it's similar to continuations).

It's also similar to the image snapshot features of many Smalltalk and Lisp environments (including emacs). Like KRANK, this feature creates a memory image that can be relaunched many times, often within different operating systems. Unlike image snapshot, the KRANK feature is implemented mainly by a computation in process outside the application itself. This eliminates the overhead of the compiler and development environment within the snapshot --- this is important for a client-side web application --- or for tree-shaking techniques to separate the application from the development environment that embeds it.

There are other techniques for optimizing Laszlo applications (and rich internet applications in general). For example, you can toggle whether media and data sets are baked into the application (for a smaller server transaction count and a faster startup experience over broadband) or requested when the application initializes or later (for a smaller initial download size, and a faster dailup startup experience). You can also use deferred instantiation --- a technique we added about two years ago, during the initial implementation of the Behr application --- to declaratively specify that objects should be created in the background, either on a per-instance or a per-class basis.

The nice thing about these techniques is that they are minimally intrusive into the source code. (In fact, KRANK is not intrusive at all, since it's more like a compiler switch such as -o in traditional compilers.) They decorate the hierarchical and functional layout of the source code, rather than requiring it to be rearranged. This is handy for a stairstep development approach, with alternating functionality sprints and performance sprints. It also makes it easier to deploy the same application to both broadband and dialup clients, separately optimized for each.

[Oliver Steele]

11:16:25 AM    

Jon Udell on Socialtext

John Udell paints the wide landscape of enterprise social software in his InfoWorld column. You may recall that Jon wrote the book on practical internet groupware some time ago and has an in-depth understanding of the promise of lightweight web-native collaboration.

We are social animals for whom networked software is creating a new kind of habitat. Social software can be defined as whatever supports our actual human interaction as we colonize the virtual realm. The category includes familiar things such as groupware and knowledge management, and extends to the new breed of relationship power tools that have brought the venture capitalists out of hibernation...

Computer-mediated communication is the lifeblood of social software. When we use e-mail, instant messaging, Weblogs, and wikis, we’re potentially free to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime. But there’s a trade off. Our social protocols map poorly to TCP/IP. Whether the goal is to help individuals create and share knowledge or to enrich the relationship networks that support sales, collaboration, and recruiting, the various kinds of enterprise social software aim to restore some of the context that’s lost when we move our interaction into the virtual realm.

In networked environments, everything we do can be monitored. Absent the natural cues that establish social context — it’s hard to see groups form at the water cooler or hear voices in the hallway through e-mail or IM — social software systems ask us to strike a bargain. If individuals agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and sell more...

Of course, we humans don’t always need to discover new collaborators. We’re already members of teams. Within those teams, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all social protocol. Outspoken individuals author the blogs popping up on corporate intranets. But other team members may prefer to contribute to a wiki, which is a collaborative space for Web writing. Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, a company whose hosted workspaces support both modes. “A blog enables people to express their identity,” he says, “while a wiki page de-emphasizes the individual and emphasizes the collective understanding of the group.”

The same person may find both modes useful in different ways. Adam Hertz, VP of technology strategy at Ofoto (a division of Kodak), uses Socialtext to coordinate his development team. During a period when he was traveling a lot, he says he started an internal blog to keep his team updated on his outside activities. It was helpful, but was unnecessary after he rejoined the team.

Whatever the mode of communication, the primary goal, Hertz says, is to create group memory....

The Socialtext approach is similar to how people network using weblogs in public. There, content comes before connection. Social context supports the decision to connnect and the group memories of conversation enable greater trust.[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

I myself use four SocialText Wikis now - on a daily basis.  Anybody use more?

11:15:46 AM    

Marc Canter posted the social computing stuff he's going to show me on Monday. Can't wait.

11:14:29 AM