I've been playing with OpenLaszlo. I get large SWF files as well, 96k for the minimal Hello World. Added things adds to the size, of course, but the 96k seems to be a baseline size for the OpenLaszlo framework.

I really liked the Indian Head test pattern widget. So I wanted to do a widget that flipped through a number of common TV test patterns. Alas, that 96k baseline, plus the size of the image resources themselves balloon it to nearly 200k. Ugh! I guess I'll have to make a separate widget for each screen. But, even so, each of those will be around 100k, 5 times the size of the existing Indian Head test pattern widget.

It doesn't help that I'm old and used to straight procedural languages. Declarative ones like OpenLaszlo hurt my head. I can't even figure out how to kick off a method upon widget load, so I can't get the widget to start flipping test cards on its own.

Then I thought about making a clock. I have an old OS X dashboard widget that shows a clock using images of nixie tubes. That should be easy. But I have yet figured out how to pull the current time in OpenLaszlo. I may just be missing something easy.

Then I thought about using a C-64 font TTF to make a little C-64 fake emulator. But the C-64 font I found on the web won't work inside a Flash app. Dunno why. (Not a Chumby-specific problem at all.)

I guess the bottom line is, while most of my problems stem from my inexperience with the framework, that 96k baseline penalty will make any OpenLaszlo widget bloated.

I have got things working ok with OpenLaszlo (other than files being a bit big). 

The key for getting network connections to work was to use the following for a canvas definition:

<canvas proxied="false" width="320" height="240">

By adding the proxied="false"  I am able to load images and xml feeds over the network.

Also, if you want to run a method on startup of a widget here is what I used.  The
initFunc method gets called on load, and the "cycle" method is called every 5 seconds to change the content on the screen.

<view id="first" width="320" height="240" bgcolor="#cca752" oninit="first.initFunc()">

..

<method name="initFunc">
             ...
             first.cycleDelegate = new LzDelegate( this, "cycle" );
             first.cycle();
</method>

<method name="cycle">
            ...

            var slice = 5000;
            LzTimer.addTimer( first.cycleDelegate  ,  slice );
</method>

Hope this saves others some time.

P.S. Things sort of work on a virtual chumby, but not everything (like missing labels on buttons).

Oh, "oninit"! (Slaps forehead.) Thanks!

Yeah, without the proxies flag, it'll assume that there's a Laszlo server on the back-end to act as a proxy.

I've also been looking at haXe as an alternative. HelloWorld is only 4k. Haven't done anything more with it than that, yet. But it did work on the chumby.