We're back from the 2009 Lasso Developer Conference, and it was a fantastic event! Attendees had a great time learning about Lasso, networking with fellow members of the Lasso Community, and making new acquaintances while catching up with long-time friends. The LassoSoft Team appreciates everyone who participated in this year's event, and we look forward to seeing you all again in 2010.
This newsletter is full of the latest news and information about Lasso and it's developers. We have a few exciting announcements to share with you, and the Lasso Community has been busy, as well. For all the juicy details, please read below.
Happy Coding,
The LassoSoft Team
Lasso 9 Release Date
LassoSoft is very excited to announce that Lasso 9, the fastest, most powerful version of Lasso ever created, will be released in early January, 2010. This version of Lasso is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication by LassoSoft, and unwavering loyalty and support from the Lasso Community.
For more information and details, please visit the Lasso 9 section of LassoSoft.com
2009 Lasso Developer Conference Content
We've created a LassoSoft channel on YouTube, and it's now been populated with content from this year's Lasso Developer Conference in Amsterdam:
http://www.youtube.com/user/LassoSoft
The content is organized by each day that it was presented, and the videos are in the order that the presenters were scheduled. For easier management (and to abide by YouTube's policies), the presentations have been divided into segments. For quick reference, each segment is numbered and labeled in sequential order.
At this time, Sessions and Advanced Tracks are available. As time allows, we will work to offer additional content, such as Beginner Tracks, Round Tables, etc.
Presenters who have uploaded their content to Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/event/2009-lasso-developer-conference/slideshows have the applicable links to that content listed on their video pages of the LassoSoft YouTube channel. Not all presenters have uploaded their content yet, and are encouraged to do so (please notify us if you do).
If any Conference Attendees have video content from the LDC that they would like to see included on the LassoSoft channel, please send an email to info@lassosoft.com with details.
We plan to organize both a LassoTech article and LassoSoft.com page with this information, in the near future. Stay tuned!
We hope you enjoy the videos from this year's event, and look forward to seeing you all again next year.
2009/2010 Lasso Developer Conference survey
LassoSoft would like to hear from you!
We're asking for feedback on the 2009 Lasso Developer Conference (LDC09), held in Amsterdam this past October. We're also asking for feedback for the upcoming 2010 Lasso Developer Conference (LDC10).
Our goal is to continue providing the best conference possible for our Lasso Community. This is the chance to make your voice heard and let us know what you're thinking. We appreciate your time and assistance with our efforts to bring you a rockin' event in 2010!
Lasso Professional Alliance Survey
LassoSoft will soon be making a big push to improve the Lasso Professional Alliance and bring as much value as possible to it's Members. In doing so, we could use your help and feedback! We would appreciate it if you could take a moment to participate in an online survey.
This feedback will assist us with deciding which areas to focus on, and the general direction of the LPA in the future.
We'd like to point out that this is a Lasso based survey from Laguna Survey. We'd like to thank our partner Lars Gundersen at Sonora IT for working with us to bring this to the Lasso Community.
Core Five Releases Open Source FileManager for CKEditor
Core Five Creative recently announced the availability of FileManager, an open source, web-based file browsing utility designed to integrate with inline HTML editors such as CKEditor and its predecessor, FCKEditor.
Many users of FCKEditor have been stuck without an upgrade path to the vastly improved CKEditor 3.0, since the new version ships without a built-in file browser. The software's creators, CKSource, offer a commercial add-on, CKFinder, but it only includes connectors for a handful of server-side languages. FileManager rectifies this by providing a simple javascript API for which connectors can be written in your server-side language of choice. For the initial release, an example connector is provided for Lasso, with plans to include additional connectors in future releases. Contributions are encouraged.
Complete details about the release, as well as installation instructions and an API reference, are available from the Core Five Labs blog.
Open Source Week Calendar for Lasso using Knop and Jquery
The jquery-week-calendar plugin provides a simple and flexible way of including a weekly calendar in your application. It is built on top of jquery and jquery ui and is inspired by other online weekly calendars such as google calendar. It's based on a Jquery plugin, WeekCalendar, using Lasso on Knop on the server side.
This open source application was originally introduced at the 2009 Lasso Developer Conference by Jolle Carlestam, and it's a valuable and time-saving tool that has been provided by him to the Lasso Community.
The code is available on the Google code Knop site.
The Week Calendar list is here: http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-week-calendar
The Knop mailing-list can be subscribed to here: http://montania.se/projects/knop/
Lfor - Open-Source Forums Application
Iterate LLC recently announced the immediate availability of Lfor, an open-source forums application for the Lasso language from Lassosoft. Lfor was demonstrated in a roundtable at the 2009 Lasso Developer Conference, in Amsterdam.
Lfor is a forums application which allows users to sign up, follow a forum, create topics, and add messages. Each message may have a photo attached. Users must sign up to use the forums, and may have up to five postnames. To be able to post, users must be approved by the administrator. A standard feature is a search function, allowing searches on topics, posts, or members. All postnames are publicly searchable.
There are provided pages for FAQ, copyright, suggestions, and terms of use pages. In case a password is forgotten, there is a retrieve password feature. For consumer-based sites, there is an information request feature that can be requested per topic. Members may subcribe to e-mail notification of new posts to a particular topic. For advertising purposes, there is the ability to include ad panels (banners). Code for an optional captcha is provided to help in spam reduction.
The Lfor codebase is provided as an open-source project managed through GoogleCode. The project location is http://code.google.com/p/lfor/.
The project maintainer is Eric Landmann of Iterate LLC. Contact Iterate at support@iterate.ws.
itPage - Open-Source CMS for Lasso
Iterate LLC recently announced the immediate availability of version 3 of itPage, an open-source content management system (CMS) for the Lasso language from Lassosoft. itPage was the subject of a roundtable talk at the 2009 Lasso Developer Conference, in Amsterdam. itPage has a feature set suitable for general-purpose commercial websites. Some of the front-end features include galleries, testimonials, multiple template, clean URLs, flexible site heirarchy, rotating stories, and portfolios.
Sites powered by itPage have a built-in search feature that searches the site content without any extra effort or coding needed by the developer. There is robust image support for many image and filetypes to be used on the webiste, including native .swf and automatic conversion of video to Flash video.
Features developers will appreciate include a user-management system, clean URLs, jQuery integration including Thickbox, ToolTips and Galleria. All source code is commented, and documentation can be found on the wiki http://code.google.com/p/itpage/w/list. Users and developers may benefit from subscribing to the talk list, managed via Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/group/itPageTalk. The wiki also documents all custom tags and provides example usages. Several sets of templates are provided with the codebase. Users will also find screencasts available for common administrative tasks like creating a gallery or portfolio on the wiki site.
The back-end features include management of all data types, individual content page overrides for SEO terms, stylesheets and templates, a comprehensive image library that allows management of all images and media in the site, a file library, and system settings/site control.
The itPage codebase is provided as an open-source project managed through GoogleCode. The project location is http://code.google.com/p/itpage/. The project maintainer is Eric Landmann of Iterate LLC. Contact Iterate at support@iterate.ws.
More comprehensive information about itPage, its features and implementation can be found on the itPage site.
Object-Oriented Programming and Lasso 9 Primer
A new article has recently been added to LassoTech. The introduction to Lasso 9 brings in some new functionality, as well as an increased exposure to object-oriented programming (OOP).
Lasso in an object-oriented language, however before version 9, it was generally received as a language that could perform either procedurally, or had the tools to get into OOP. This article is meant to clarify how OOP works, how Lasso developers have been using OOP techniques without knowing them, and clarify some of the terminology.
