[osteele]

I’ll put in a plug for my former employer’s OpenLaszlo, introduced in 2002 (preview) and 2003 (version 1.0).

OpenLaszlo was most immediately inspired by HTML and (for data binding) XSLT. I looked at Mozart for ideas on constraints, but we ended up rolling our own design — mostly because constraints were never supposed to be a feature, so they were designed and developed incrementally, in discretely releasable baby steps.

Adobe did due diligence of the company sometime around 2002-2003 too, but that deal fell through. An Adobe PM also signed up for our beta program, initially under a pseudonym, but he eventually came clean. I’ve always been curious whether Flex/MXML was related to either of those encounters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo

[2] https://ssl.weepee.org/lps-4.6.1/docs/developers/program-dev...

[nl]

I played with OpenLaszlo way back then. It was pretty nice.

[underwater]

Adam Wolff, former Chief Software Architect of Open Lazlo, is now the Director of Product Infrastructure at Facebook, and oversees React and React Native.

[osteele]

Adam developed the initial runtime implementation of data binding and constraints — with additional help from Max Carlson, and, later, P. Tucker Withington and Henry Minsky — while I did the compiler work and language design[1][2]. Adam et al wrote the runtime constraint resolution mechanism, which initially had an API for the procedural creation of constraint graphs. I was trying to make constraints and data binding look like JavaScript expressions, that were automagically recomputed when a subexpression value changed, by extracting dependency graphs from the source and packaging them for runtime use. (All this on the Flash 5 bytecode interpreter, which was slow as the dickens, even for the time — so there was a lot of optimization: in the compiler, in the runtime, and in the interstices. Although nothing like we did later for [3].)

This was the bottom of a slippery slope, where the designers and developers using the platform were exploring the kinds of applications it was possible to write (single-page web applications were relatively new in the early oughts — except for some pioneering Explorer-only DHTML work by Microsoft, which we should have looked at but didn’t — and we were all making up interaction patterns and software design idioms as we went along), and we were adding the platform features to enable some capabilities and golf others.

For a while Adam ran Laszlo’s Professional Services. He succeeded me as CSA when I left Laszlo.

It wasn’t Flex/MXML or XAML that killed Laszlo/OpenLaszlo, it was IMO first-gen dynamic frameworks such as Prototype and Scriptaculous, that could be gradually integrated into a page without placing a big rewrite-your-app bet. Also that we were about a year late in adding HTML as a second back end. (HTML wasn’t sufficiently standardized or practical to use for cross-browser single-page applications in 2001 when we started work on the Laszlo platform implementation, but it was by 2005-6.) Or, closer to the root cause: sales and strategy issues that made it difficult to keep investing much in the platform once it was starting to get traction; the product feature omissions are how those resource constraints played out.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050039165A1/

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050038796A1/

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050114871A1/