I had a lot of fun this weekend playing with OpenLaszlo, a very cool open source development environment for interactive web applications. I was led to OpenLaszlo through my interest in Red5 and OpenMeetings which runs on Red5.

While searching around for tutorials to get started with OpenLaszlo, I stumbled on TechScreencast where two other open source projects caught my eye, Drools, a Java rules engine, and Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC and Castle MonoRail.

Although open source software has defnitely become more professional over the years, there are often hidden costs in training, maintenance, support and functionality. Many open source projects are the basis for commercial ventures of enhanced software built on top of the open source project or providing professional packages/services on top of the open source project. For example, Laszlo Systems.

What a world! So much great, free software! I remained focus on getting up to speed with OpenLaszlo and only posted these other things on my blog for possible future investigation.