To listen to David Temkin, you'd think the future was here already.
As chief technology officer of San Francisco start-up Laszlo Systems, Temkin is selling the idea that the long-predicted era has arrived in which software applications will live on Web sites rather than desktops.
Now Temkin is betting that a recent open-source gamble will propel his company's vision of Internet applications ahead of its formidable competition.
With the October release of Laszlo's core technology to an open-source development group it created, the company is trying to take on an established company, Macromedia, which is, in turn, going after the fiercest software adversary of them all -- Microsoft.
Microsoft's XAML language is designed to build Windows applications tied closely to the Internet. While some companies are already building XAML applications that run with Microsoft's .Net client, the proprietary XML dialect is meant for use with Microsoft's Longhorn operating system. While Longhorn has suffered chronic delays and isn't expected until the end of 2006, few doubt its impact will be significant once released.
More immediately, Macromedia is busy promoting its Flex server software, which runs Internet applications written in Macromedia's MXML language. Macromedia recently announced a free version of Flex for non-commercial applications and updated the software with new features.
Temkin recently spoke to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com about the company's view of the computing present and future, and why his sights are set on besting Macromedia.
Q: If Web applications are here already, what do we need Laszlo for?
A: There is still a serious gap in what Web applications provide. Today's Web applications are based on the page-by-page HTML model -- which was never designed to support applications -- and what the end user sees on the vast majority of Web sites is a series of flat pages, connected by links. This is an awkward way to drive an application.
Where Laszlo, Flex, and Longhorn fit in is in enhancing the power and productivity of these networked end-user applications by making them more application-like. These technologies can make existing Web applications more responsive and powerful. They can also enable applications that previously could not be realistically deployed as Web applications.
Help us digest this alphabet soup that's emerging. Microsoft is serving up XAML, Macromedia's got MXML, and you've got LZX.
LZX is Laszlo's client-independent XML description language for rich-client applications. The Laszlo Presentation Server compiles LZX into SWF (Macromedia's Flash format), which runs in any browser on any platform that has Flash 5 or later installed. In the future, LZX will be compiled into client formats other than SWF, such as Java and the .Net client.
MXML is Macromedia's Flash-based XML description language for rich-client applications -- this is the core of Flex. The Flex server compiles MXML into SWF, which runs in any browser on any platform that has Flash 7 installed. And XAML is Microsoft's Longhorn-based description language for rich-client applications. Unlike LZX or MXML, these applications are Windows-based, rather than Web-based, and more deeply integrated with the underlying OS and hardware.
What does putting your presentation server into open-source development do to help you compete? How did you distribute your software before?
We have open-sourced our whole platform. There's no poison pill -- no "if you're commercial, you pay us" -- anyone can use it.
Our software was licensed the way application servers are: on a per-server basis. The more you serve, the more concurrent users, the more you need to pay. That's the way Flex is licensed. But now that the source code is open and available, we're working on establishing alliances to get this platform, especially the LZX language, to be a standard. That benefits us and the industry because this is the open Web. It's open source. It runs everywhere and runs in any browser. XAML needs IE and .Net.
XAML and LZX are in slightly different categories. XAML is the new way of writing Windows applications. This is the new way of writing Web applications. There's a convergence, but we're still committed to working in any browser and running over the Web. XAML provides much tighter integration with the OS -- that's not what we're doing. We're doing Web apps. With LZX we compile into Macromedia Flash, and we're looking at .Net and Java. If we get the .Net thing running, you'd be able to write a single source code base which works on anything Flash Version 5 or later, and, when Longhorn ships, will run within the .Net environment. It spans those two worlds and we want to do the same thing with Java.
