At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Laszlo Systems today announced the planned extension of its advanced Ajax application development platform, OpenLaszlo, to support the delivery of applications in browsers with or without a Flash plug-in. By the end of this year, developers using OpenLaszlo will have the option to deploy their applications using either Flash or DHTML, an open-standard technology built into most Web browsers. Laszlo executives will preview the company’s DHTML deployment capabilities at the conference with a live demonstration, which is also accessible on the open source community site, www.openlaszlo.org.

Today’s announcement reinforces Laszlo’s commitment to the Open Ajax community, which it established last month along with IBM, Oracle, BEA, RedHat, Yahoo!, Google and others. The extension of OpenLaszlo, already open source, to support not only Flash but also DHTML will give developers the option to deploy applications using a fully open software stack. This natural evolution capitalizes on the architecture of OpenLaszlo, designed from its inception to be able to support multiple client runtimes across computers and consumer devices.

“OpenLaszlo has always been independent of Flash from a developer’s perspective,” said David Temkin, founder and chief technology officer, Laszlo Systems. “The use of Flash to run OpenLaszlo applications was a pragmatic choice when we started Laszlo in 2000 because it was the only ubiquitous and consistent runtime option at that time. But since then, DHTML has evolved as an open standard and is now a viable alternative to Flash to run many OpenLaszlo applications.”

Steve Ciesinski, chairman and chief executive officer of Laszlo Systems, added, “Our vision from the start was to enable compelling applications across different runtimes and consumer devices, including mobile phones and TV set-tops, and our plans to support DHTML are consistent with that vision.”

Now in version 3.1, the OpenLaszlo platform uses AJAX in a highly evolved mark-up language, enabling development of Web-based applications that are as rich and robust as traditional client-based software programs. In contrast to more recent “Ajax toolkits,” OpenLaszlo offers a sophisticated framework and a comprehensive set of components that are abstracted from client runtime software, thereby dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of application development. OpenLaszlo has already been adopted across various market sectors, including enterprise, consumer, government and education, and has over 125,000 downloads to date.