OpenLaszlo, for which I am the documentation guy, now compiles to DHTML as well as to Macromedia Flash (swf). That means that you can take the same LZX source and compile it to either swf or DHTML, and it will just work. So there is now a completely OpenSource stack for doing web apps.
OpenLaszlo is much more robust and full featured than any other Ajax toolkit. And, the architecture includes a client abstraction layer, which means that we worry about browser inconsistencies so you don’t have to. The upshot of all this is that if you want to build a real web application, you should use OpenLaszlo instead of some Ajax toolkit. Of course if you just want to spruce up a web page, Dojo or Rico or something like that might be appropriate. But I think you would have to be nuts to use them for building a real application.
We’re not yet shipping a “production” version — that’s scheduled for “sometime in 2006”– but the prototype version is getting more robust by the day, and there is a very credible demo up on the website.
How can you put DHTML and “will just work” in the same sentence?
Just giving you a hard time. This is clearly The Right Thing(TM). You guys have the smarts to make the browser-specfic stuff work right for everybody, so that us application-developing mortals don’t have to.
For all you folks out there trying to make DHTML things work across platform, please do have a look at http://www.quirksmode.org/j… — It’s an oldie, but classic.