Lasso includes a simple template system allowing code to control generation of HTML and other content types.

Lasso also supports Query Expressions,[4] allowing elements within arrays and other types of sequences to be iterated, filtered, and manipulated using a natural language syntax similar to SQL.

Lasso code can be packaged into standalone executable programs called "LassoApps", in which folder structures are compiled into single files.

In the fall of 1995, independent developer Vince Bonfanti wrote a new CGI based on ROFM, using C/C++ for improved performance, and using the notion of HTML-based "templates" instead of relying on calculation fields.

This proved very popular in the FileMaker community, and was brought to the attention of Bill Doerrfeld, owner of Blue World Communications Inc., a print and website development firm based out of Issaquah, Washington, who bought the source code.

[14] Following the release of the Lasso 1.2 lineup in January 1997, Blue World and the Bonfantis entered private talks with Claris, the software division of Apple Computer, and owner of FileMaker Pro.

Lasso 5 included, among many updates, a completely rewritten architecture (for OS X, Windows, Linux), and an embedded MySQL database.

Since v2.0, Lasso was fully multithreaded, allowing many connections at once, but succumbed to FileMaker's latency or lag in certain operations, and there was no way to get around it reliably other than to make major changes to the data source.

[citation needed] Blue World Communications released a series of plug-ins for popular Web development packages from Macromedia and Adobe.

On August 1 of 2004, Bill Doerrfeld officially sold the Lasso product line to OmniPilot Software, Inc. in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

[27] On October 25, 2004, OmniPilot officially announced the release of Lasso 8, a version including sandboxing for multiple sites on the same server and connectivity to many new datasources.

[32][33] Recognizing the need to be competitive against much more popular languages such as PHP and ASP, radical changes in architecture, syntax and structure were made and released as Lasso 9.0.

Technical challenges caused by these changes, coupled with limited marketing resources, led to significant community decline as the company struggled to release documentation and support for the new language.

The inline command supports a large range of parameters[56] allowing developers to interact with databases that they may not have intimate knowledge of.