Webtuner Application Added to Webtop

Vortex is an OpenLaszlo application built by Real Time Matrix. It’s essentially a customizable media browser – Real Time Matrix built a highly-configurable skeleton of the application, and brands it for various content providers. End-users can then embed the application into their own web pages, or into personal start pages (e.g. igoogle). The end-user gets fed various forms of content – streaming audio, video, images, news feeds, etc. – depending on the configuration of that particular Vortex. In exchange, they see discreet ads at the bottom of the Vortex application. You can see a variety of skinned Vortices at www.vortexme.com.

What’s new is that the Vortex has now been integrated into Laszlo Webtop. You can check it out at www.gowebtop.com. You do need an account for gowebtop.com, but it’s fairly quick and free.

Vortex Application in Laszlo Webtop
Vortex Application in Laszlo Webtop

What’s interesting to OpenLaszlo developers is:

  • The Vortex application is completely dynamically-skinned. The components in the Vortex can be enabled, disabled and re-ordered without recompiling the SWF. All resources in the application get loaded over HTTP when the application initializes. This performs surprisingly well.
  • You can plug an OpenLaszlo application into Webtop relatively easily. Webtop provides the notion of applications, as well as windowing/docking/undocking behavior. And, Webtop includes some applicaitons that people use the most (Mail, Contacts, Calendar).

Although Webtop does offer a service that proxies and optimizes data transactions between the client and data stores, you don’t have to use it; you can just compile an OpenLaszlo application that uses datasets in the normal way into Webtop, and run it alongside the existing applications.

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