Laszlo Systems has 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 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

By the end of this year, developers using OpenLaszlo will have the option to deploy their applications using either Flash or Dynamic HTML (DHTML), an open-standard technology built into most Web browsers.

It also 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.

"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."

Now in version 3.1, the OpenLaszlo platform uses Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (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.  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.