Open Laszlo is now available. Lazlo has been around for a while but is now Open Source and it looks very interesting. Basically it is a way of writing very pretty user interfaces that run inside flash inside your web browser. There are simple ways to get these to communicate to your server using REST principals (XML over HTTP).
One of the nice things this can do is let you write an application server that only provides and responds to XML. Then write a separate UI to use the published XML over HTTP interface using Lazlo. You now have something that is incredibnly loosly coupled and is very much easier to test. You can of course then also write other user interfaces in almost anything using the same API. Not only that but this also makes it simple to have the UI and application running on different servers and written in different languages.
Now I am not in faviour of Flash very much at all for public websites, but for extranet and intranet applications I think this appears absolutely fantastic.
Only significant issue I have not yet seen solved is accessibility, particularly ability to zoom. No idea either about how screen readers would work with it.
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