Chaotic laser, viewed as a special form of laser outputs, has noise-like timeseries and wide frequency spectrum bandwidth. In recent years, the application of chaotic laser has attracted the wide attentions as the characteristics of chaos laser are being understood and controlled. Combined with the research situation，the current hot spots and the research progresses of the chaotic laser applications are riviewed in the fields of high-speed random bit sequence generation, chaos secure communication and chaos key distribution,chaotic laser ladar and chaotic optical time domain reflectometer, ultrawideband pulse signal generator, laser source with tunable coherence length and chaos computing. Furthermore, some possible development orientations in the future are pointed out.