Laszlo Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced the release of OpenLaszlo 3.0, the latest version of the company's open-source platform for building rich Internet applications and services.

The San Mateo, Calif., company said it renamed its Laszlo Presentation Server to OpenLaszlo to reflect the company's move to an open-source licensing model. Laszlo announced in October that it was moving to an open-source model and making its rich application platform available under the Common Public License.

OpenLaszlo 3.0 provides two ways to deploy applications, the company said. One way is Standalone OpenLaszlo Output or SOLO, and the other is with the OpenLaszlo Server. Applications can be deployed SOLO from any HTTP Web server to provide data integration via XML. Meanwhile, applications that require data integration through SOAP, XML-RPC or Java-RPC, or that require persistent connection capabilities or run-time media transcoding are deployed with the OpenLaszlo Server within J2EE or Java Servlet Container environments, the company said.

The new version also features Unicode support, a new drawing API to support charting and graphing, and performance enhancements via Dynamic Libraries and optimizations for Macromedia Inc.'s Flash 6 and 7.

Laszlo partners such as IBM Corp. lauded the company's efforts.

"Laszlo Systems' recent move to open source its presentation server has attracted a significant amount of interest from developers and ISVs who want to develop rich Internet applications," said David Boloker, chief technology officer of Emerging Internet Technologies for the IBM Software Group, in a statement. "Rich Web-based applications have the potential to substantially enhance the end-user experience. And we are very excited about the positive impact OpenLaszlo and IBM's IDE for Laszlo have had in this area already by providing simple easy-to-use tools that harness the power of declarative user interfaces."

Also in a statement, Oliver Steele, chief software architect at Laszlo, said: "This is a pivotal announcement in the history of Laszlo ... We're excited to announce SOLO, which provides unmatched ease and flexibility to developers, companies and ISPs. With SOLO, OpenLaszlo is now as easy to deploy as a DHTML application but, unlike DHTML, delivers far superior user interface capabilities and readily supports all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems without further development effort."

The OpenLaszlo system is free and runs on Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. It can be downloaded at www.laszlosystems.com/developers.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.