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What is OpenLaszlo, and What is it Good For?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon May 22, 2006 05:32 PM
from the things-to-play-with dept.
SimHacker writes to share an article he wrote recently that tries to answer the question; What is OpenLaszlo, and What is it Good For? From the article: "OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for developing user friendly web based applications, which work identically across all popular browsers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc). It's ideal for presenting and editing raw XML data generated by PHP and other web services."

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[+] OpenLaszlo 3.0 Announced 40 comments
gse writes "The friendly folks at Laszlo Systems (of which I am one) have just announced the release of OpenLaszlo 3.0. Cool new features in this release: SOLO deployment (compile standalone .swf applications that don't need a proxy server), dynamically loadable libraries, a drawing API, and a bunch of optimizations. Info and downloads are at openlaszlo.org. (OpenLaszlo has been covered before on Slashdot.)"
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  • Drupal (Score:3, Funny)

    by dotslashdot (694478) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:36PM (#15384197)
    That cross dressing site management software "Drupal" says too many connections.
    • Mirror up by SimHacker (Score:3) Monday May 22 2006, @07:16PM
      • Re:Mirror up by Doc Ruby (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @01:13PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Zero to Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    Zero to slashdotted in no comments flat.
  • I don't mean to troll... (Score:2, Informative)

    Sometimes I find this AJAX movement annoying. Not because of the new technologies emerging, and not because of the amount of people wanting to learn it. I find it more annoying because of the whole dumbing down initiative.

    Work a little harder, learn a little more and create something a lot more intuitive.
    • yeah man by bunions (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @05:47PM
    • Dumbing Down? by briancnorton (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:05PM
      • Re:Dumbing Down? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mangu (126918) on Monday May 22 2006, @07:10PM (#15384609)
        Are you the same guy that uses vi because it does the same thing as notepad?


        I'm the guy that uses vi because I could never guess how to make notepad do the simplest things one could imagine. Like indenting a function, showing code with syntax highlight or moving to the start of the next block.


        Those things that every programmer does all the time and are so simple in vi and so impossible to do in notepad.

        [ Parent ]
      • Achtung! by Bloke down the pub (Score:1) Tuesday May 23 2006, @09:46AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:I don't mean to troll... by Rdickinson (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:07PM
    • Re: I don't mean to troll... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Graboid (975267) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:13PM (#15384400)
      You say that like it's a bad thing.

      Dumbing down IT programming (and IT in general) has been a huge trend throughout the industry for years. I remember teaching Fortune 100 financial analysts Visual Basic and how to hook up to an Oracle stock database we built and they were on cloud nine. Later our secretaries setup and maintained our department's homepage - it was great and really represented a milestone in our company as well as a symbolic milestone within IT.

      The future of IT is all about dumbing down so technology just becomes a part of everyday life - not some uber-geeky medium that takes years to master. Letting 'normal' folks develop and support websites moves content from an IT shop to the business folks where it belongs!
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:I don't mean to troll... by tenchiken (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:15PM
    • Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by colmore (56499) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:28PM (#15384454)
      (Last Journal: Tuesday December 09 2003, @02:47AM)
      Lowering the entry barrier is always a good thing. When C compilers got good enough that applications could be written with only a minimum of assembly, people groaned about the same thing. There's a lot of hype right now, and a lot of interest, things will settle down.

      All of these frameworks and libraries and doohickies come about for a simple reason: web application programming is too complicated. Given the relatively simple functionality being designed, coding an (even non-AJAX) webapp is a pain in the ass involving a mostly stateless system running 4 or 5 languages. The techniques for getting around this problem are relatively cookie cutter, and we really should no more be coding them by hand than we should be rolling our own printf every time we write a terminal utility.

      There's more creativity and action in interactive online software than ever before, and it's nothing but a good thing.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:I don't mean to troll... by Maxmin (Score:1) Thursday May 25 2006, @09:37PM
  • Security? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vanyel (28049) * on Monday May 22 2006, @05:38PM (#15384219)
    (Last Journal: Thursday August 28 2003, @02:54PM)
    Security restrictions prevent the Flash player from fetching XML from hosts other than the one it do wnloaded the SWF file from. It requires a crossdomain.xml permission file to exist on other servers from which Flash downloads content or calls web services.

    The solution is for the OpenLaszlo Server or PHP to act as a proxy for other servers.

    Isn't there a reason for that? I would like to see something that specifically addresses the security issues here...

    • Re:Security? by Klaruz (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @05:50PM
      • Re:Security? by vanyel (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @05:57PM
        • Re:Security? by Klaruz (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:27PM
          • Re:Security? by vanyel (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:40PM
    • Re:Security? by tenchiken (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:11PM
      • Re:Security? by SimHacker (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @09:58PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Security? by SimHacker (Score:3) Monday May 22 2006, @06:27PM
      • Re:Security? by JahToasted (Score:3) Monday May 22 2006, @07:18PM
        • Re:Security? by jubei (Score:1) Monday May 22 2006, @07:38PM
  • will it help? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:40PM (#15384231)
    (http://evil.google.com/)
    Will it help me win all the prizes in a big sweepstakes?
  • by pavera (320634) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:40PM (#15384235)
    (Last Journal: Tuesday December 31 2002, @08:24AM)
    I don't know what it is good for, but I'd have to say its not good for:

    Sites that you might want to withstand a slashdotting.

    Seriously never seen a site down so fast, the first comment was about how it was slashdotted.
    • Wrong layer by xeno-cat (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:16PM
  • by pla (258480) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:44PM (#15384247)
    (Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
    Seriously, the summary lacks something... like "how does this differ from Emacs/VI"? I can edit HTML or XML just fine in Emacs or VI. I can run them on just about any platform in existance. The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.


    With apologies to Edwin Starr.
    • by SirSlud (67381) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:10PM (#15384388)
      (http://www.sirsonic.com/)
      Its not edit, like YOU edit the XML, its edit as in have non-programmers edit data. You can use Lazlo to build web apps using SWF or DHTML for the view layer, and from my experience, Lazlo is makes quite a nifty RAD web platform to provide the view/edit layer for XML data (and under that, the database layer.) Others have pointed out that your Lazlo app can speak directly to java applications as well. Its an extremely thin platform to provide a really rich user experience on, with minimal re-inventing-the-wheel overhead.

      > The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.

      What do you want, a gold star? Why is this site full of programmers who discount new tools to add to the toolbox out of hand? Lazlo is pretty neat. I was a distributed web application programmer for a long time (FreeBSD, CORBA), now I write games for consoles like the PS2 ... if I didn't have tools to make my job easier, and had to do everything in vi just to prove I could, I'd go crazy. I think programmers who are so self-contented with being able to do things the 'hard-core' way just because they can are seriously missing the point. I can do everything you can do, but the more important question is why would I want to? Sure, I still use vi from time to time, but only when it makes sense to do so. I'm open to anything from vi to Visual Studio, as long as it saves me time and makes it easier for me to make my knowledge more valuable to people around me.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:HUH! Yeah, absolutely nothing, listen to me by SimHacker (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:48PM
    • MM: Parent not a troll! by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Tuesday May 23 2006, @04:28AM
  • Fantastic for thin client development (Score:5, Interesting)

    by siberian (14177) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:44PM (#15384251)
    Since Laszlo apps can be output either as DHTML or as SWF contained content it works wonders for embedded development.

    I'm building a small embedded linux based system to handle my A/V switching infrastructure in my home. The box itself can be considered a toaster, very much like a LinkSys router. Combining thttpd, Ruby (small footprint with Ruby2exe) serving POX(Plain Ole XML) and then Laszlo as the SWF contained client I can provide a hugely rich experience for the user on my minimalistic embedded platform.

    The Eclipe IDE tools are 'Ok' and do the job well enough at the start but you'll need to tweak it a bit more to get a really solid look.

    Overall this is a fantastic alternative to Adobe Flex in many ways, particularly in its openness, huge community support and low/no cost. Flex 2.0 is also low low cost now but we will see how that plays out.

    So, for me Laszlo is Rich App on a thin client primarily. Very nice.

  • slashdotted (Score:1)

    by phiber9 (943697) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:45PM (#15384258)
    (http://www.xatrix.org/)
    as others have reported, it's already slashdotted. coral cache has the same page (http://www.donhopkins.com.nyud.net:8080/drupal/no de/124) but, is this [openlaszlo.org] maybe it?
  • From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:5, Informative)

    by spoco2 (322835) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:48PM (#15384274)
    (http://simon.oconnorlamb.com/)
    Firstly, Google cache [72.14.203.104].

    I've been coding in Laszlo for almost a year now for a new product my company is launching soon, and I have to say it's a great language to use. A very easy way to create great web applications while still being able to write completely Object Orientated code... There's absolutely zero need to code in a WYSIWYG style method ala visual basic or the like, our application dynamically loads in its objects and layout from a db, completely configurable... it's all very nice.

    The article itself is quite a nice summary of what Laszlo is I suppose. It does seem to harp on a bit about PHP as a back end, when there is nothing tying laszlo to php at all... we were using Ruby, now we're using Java, and are able o talk directly to Java classes from within Laszlo code using a JavaRPC structure. As the Laszlo server is a Java app, it all sits together nicely.

    Also it's good to see it mentioning the alternate runtime of DHTML which is currently able to be played with at Openlaszlo.org [openlaszlo.org] (currently in pre-beta). So, in the future you'll be able to write your code and chose to render it to Flash OR DHMTL or Both... it's all very nice.

    Is there anything that people who are interesting in Laszlo would like to know from someone who's been coding in it for a while? As while I'm not a zealot of it or anything, I do like it a lot, and just would love to see as many people as possible using it. :)
    • Grammar nitpick by Acy James Stapp (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:21PM
    • Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo by NovaX (Score:2) Monday May 22 2006, @06:48PM
      • Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:5, Insightful)

        by spoco2 (322835) on Monday May 22 2006, @07:20PM (#15384640)
        (http://simon.oconnorlamb.com/)
        - I like the idea of using JavaServer Faces and renderkits, so you can easily migrate to different presentation technologies. Did you write directly to Lazlo's API or use a renderkit-type method? IBM has a Lazlo-JSF renderkit and that seems like the best way to go in that world.

        Laszlo's code is not tied completely to an actual final renderpath... ie. while currently your only option is flash, as can be seen on their homepage, they have a working DHTML output that works as well... and the idea is that the code you write is independant of what output it finally has.

        We code in Laszlo's mixture of XML and Javascript, and it compiles that to Flash for rendering. The final output may be in a browser, may be on a phone, or whatever.

        - If you're writing to the API, how tied to it are you? With a rederkit, you can quickly make changes from a web-browser to a PDA, with the components taking care of the display issues. Is display migration an issue?
        OK, so we're writing our own 'renderkit' if you will... we're using a modification of the Visual Proxy methodology [javaworld.com] and as such our final display objects can be changed and modified based on what it's rendering to. But we do use a number of the inbuilt Laszlo visual components (windows, buttons, sliders and the like)... but as they render in flash, anything you can run flash on, they'll run on.

        - How is performance? I've always found the examples on OpenLazlo to be slow, limitted, and not seem to be very useful in the real world.
        Performance is always something that we battle with, but we're trying to manipulate hundreds of linked visual objects onscreen at one time, with many calculations running in the background. You have to be tricky here and there, but you can do some amazing things. Basically, the limitations are not really a result of Laszlo as such, but the fact that you're running an app within a web browser, and you always have to be conscious of that. The more you use it though, the more you learn the tricks to get a great user experience... I would hate to be trying to do this in DHTML.

        - How much time have you spend on the UI versus other techniques (e.g. DHTML/AJAX)? If longer with Lazlo, do your customers see your UI as value-added? Does it reduce your time from working on the core business-logic?

        (First up... this is AJAX, very much so it's Asynchronous Javascript and XML)
        We spend a fair amount of time on the UI, but only because the main thrust of our app is presenting a whole lot of data in a visual way that the users can interact with in different ways to any other applications in this space... so it's a large portion of the appeal of this app. That it's targetted at the Marketing teams of companies means that it should be easy to use and appealing to work with, hence the flash interface.

        We have coded other PHP/Javascript/DB applications for clients (we have one being finished up at present), and while they're nice to work with etc. And do take less time to initially code they have a number of drawbacks:
        * Maintenance is harder as writing directly for HTML output means trying to be cross-browser friendly, which results in solutions for each of the major browsers. Flash means it just works the same, full stop.
        * It looks the same. While you can do some pretty great things with DHTML etc. It's all still pretty web browser looking, you're tied to that due to limitations of what you can do, and performance issues if you stray too far from the simple. Flash allows you to have nice transitions, animation of key things, fluid interface interactions etc. Plus it's can be very different visually if you so wish.
        * As for the time we can spend on Business Logic vs Interface. As in this space we are coding in an OO language, and can create nice class seperation and encapsulation, we can completely split off our business logic from our presentation code. This makes ongoing maintenance of either side of that equation
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo by schvenk (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @07:34AM
    • I beg to differ by glesga_kiss (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @03:35AM
    • Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:4, Informative)

      by spoco2 (322835) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:24PM (#15384438)
      (http://simon.oconnorlamb.com/)
      Did you see Pandora [pandora.com] listed in the article? That's a fully fledged, and nice app. Also Laszlo mail is installed as the default webmail for Earthlink subscribers? And of course... there's this [openlaszlo.org] list of apps! :)
      [ Parent ]
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • by SirSlud (67381) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:51PM (#15384291)
    (http://www.sirsonic.com/)
    From my tinkering with it a few years ago, its really quite a neat little sandbox develop neat little web componants (flash based or dhtml based) from xml feeds. To me, it kinda seemed like a neat 'OSX Dashboard' concept for the web. People could develop neat UI interfaces fed by xml data, and those componants could be shared, or forked, or what have you.
  • by BigGar' (411008) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:54PM (#15384303)
    (http://slashdot.org/)
    That Open Lazlo was an open source project to easily fillout those, no purchase neccessary, enter as often as you like, sweepstakes entry forms?
  • by Trinition (114758) on Monday May 22 2006, @05:57PM (#15384313)
    (http://www.trinition.org/)

    To me, OpenLaszlo is not about the web. If you think about what it does, it allow syou to specify a complete user interface and logic in an XML file. The layout is done with XML, and the logic is done with ECMAScript (yes, that's what JavaScript became).

    The first OpenLaszlo solution compiled this XML into Flash which can run in any browser. Then they made a new compiler which turns it into DHTML so youd on't need Flash any more. So now you can take the same application written once (as an LZX XML file) and compile it to Flash or DHTML and get the same behavior. Both of those are very ubiquitous mediums. If you read their roadmap, they also have plans for Java client.

    My hope is that one day, there will just be clients that read the LZX XML directly. These clients could be written in Java, .NET, TclTk, C++, you name it. They would all read the same LZX XML and render it for the user. That's very much how various different browsers all read the same HTML file and render it. So you might be thinking that its no better than HTML, but:

    • It is a tighter specification than the original HTML which planted the seed for incompatibilities
    • It is designed from the beginning for user interface declaration, not text markup
    • It leverages two well-accepted standards: XML and ECMAScript

    If I had to pick a solution for the world to use for rich internet applications, I'd choose OpenLaszlo over Java Applets, Java WebStart, Macromedia Flex, DHTML, etc.

  • What is it good for? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2006, @05:58PM (#15384320)
    What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
  • One thing: (Score:1)

    by ninja_assault_kitten (883141) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:08PM (#15384378)
    PHP is not a web service.
  • by Rdickinson (160810) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:12PM (#15384397)
    Its easy to develop in, XML based with javascript, OO, clean and featured, extensible, can talk to whatever back end data you have (java, soap, php whatever) renders meadia/feature rich great looking client apps into browsers (or stand alone) using either Flash or DHTML.

    It is NOT flash or DHTML, its a language with a compilter/renderer, output is flash (and very soon DHTML).

    Easiest way to produce clean great looking feature rich web applications I;ve found.
  • by catch23 (97972) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:13PM (#15384399)
    I don't know whether it's fault of my firefox browser, or fault of their webpage, but I don't have a high confidence of a software product that advertises cross-platform capability but crashes in my Linux based Firefox. Does www.openlazlo.org crash in anyone else's browser besides mine? Or perhaps I'm just an outlier.

  • Huh! Good God! (Score:2)

    by SensitiveMale (155605) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:14PM (#15384402)
    Absolutely nuthin!
    Say it again y'all.
  • Check out Flex 2 [adobe.com]. It's similar to OpenLaszlo; free as in beer and the source code is provided. However, applications built with Flex 2 run much faster than OpenLaszlo applications, there are a ton more features, and the programming model is better.
  • rhymes with openlezbo (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by sl4shd0rk (755837) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:24PM (#15384436)
    I'm all for it, whatever it does. As long as I can watch.
  • by mikeron (837641) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:31PM (#15384462)
    "Making an arm of swiss cheese?"
  • well (Score:2)

    by icepick72 (834363) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:42PM (#15384498)
    I remember a similar front page article on Slashdot a year ago. If you gotta' ask what it's good for again, and if it hasn't made its way into the public yet, then Slashdot will most immediate site hits and promote interest but unless the questions is ever answered, it will fizzle again.
  • by palantir0 (945761) on Monday May 22 2006, @06:43PM (#15384505)
    Laszlo is basically a javascript compiler where the render agent is either flash or dhtml. There is a cool demo taking the same source and targetting flash or dhtml but dhtml it isn't ready for primetime yet. Who should use it? Applications with long running time - I have found nearly every site leaks memory. Some of this is IE basically allowing leaks for backwards compatibility and others from just bad coding. I have found laslzo to be stable in this regard. Small applets are very easy also and present very well. In all, it is probably the best package out there. It is well rounded, looks good, and quick to develop for. I think its popularity will rise tremendously when dhtml targetting is out of beta. Cheers
  • I started learning haXe [haxe.org] last week. It's pretty cool.
    haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
    This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
    haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
    Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash [haxe.org] tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
    To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
    On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!
  • One major shortcoming. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Schmig (225893) on Monday May 22 2006, @09:28PM (#15385060)
    I did a development job with Flex lately and was impressed, to say the least. In less than a day I had prototyped the entire interface of a rich administration UI, including tabbed panels, wizards, drag and drop between lists, etc.

    Contrast this again so called AJAX; the day would have spent trying to figure out why my resizable table columns were jumping across the page in internet exploder. A comparable prototype would have taken weeks.

    Once finished that work I thought seriouly about moving my own projects across to Flex but was put off by the prohibitive price (OK, I see this has changed in some way apparently...) So I investigated Lazslo, and herein is the point I want to make.

    Laszlo lacks an *extremely* important aspect of Flex; declarative bindings from client side flash controls/models to remote java beans. In Flex, you can provide a thin service wrapper for whatever API you want to work against and declaratively tie client apps to it in minutes. Flash looks after the (asynchronous) serialization of deeply nested java obj graphs to actionscript and vice versa; in my experience this worked flawlessly. Lazslo on the other hand required the client to invoke something akin to a servlet that would generate a bunch of XML; this could be parsed by the client runtime and various controls populated.

    Seems to me this is quite a major shortfalling compared to Flex which can for instance bidirectionally bind list controls to the return value of your service method public List getXXXXX. IMHO it puts the products in two different leagues. And mind you this was Flex 1.5 so probably the technology is better again. Apologies for sounding like a salesman..but I felt here at last was a web UI technology usable without selling one's soul...
  • We wrote Gliffy in Laszlo... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vidog (83824) on Monday May 22 2006, @09:57PM (#15385157)
    (http://www.vidog.com/)
    ...and it worked for us.

    Our web based diagram editor:

    http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/ [gliffy.com]

    Chris Kohlhardt
    Co-founder, Gliffy Inc.
  • Yep, this is exactly the kind of tool that Microsoft and other Big Software wants to have and see widely used. The more that people begin seeing software as deliverable "content" rather than the buy-it-at-Sears appliance that it is, the easier it will be for Microsoft and other Big Software companies to force us to pay for it all every month.
  • COMIX on LAZSLO (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tiago.cardoso (976597) on Tuesday May 23 2006, @05:54AM (#15385924)
    Hey, Laszlo also worked for us in a good way.

    MaiNada Comics [mainada.net] use Open Laszlo for the drawing and displaying of comics.

    It's a new and free site, where users can draw their comic strips directly online. It's really fun and has some cool features. Other users drawing are drawn in "real time" and are ranked by everyone. Strips can be viewed by ranting, date or user. Anyone can even blog their comics with one line of code (an iFrame link). This is an important resource to artists wanting to publish their work online without the knowledge to create a website. And it's a good initiative for comic art.

    Chek it out and see what Lazslo can be used for!
    ( MaiNada Comics - Laszlo Drawing tool [mainada.net] )
  • rush hour (Score:1)

    by lon3st4r (973469) on Tuesday May 23 2006, @06:36AM (#15386043)
    What is it good for?

    Absolutely nothing! Say it again!

    Can't help but remember the song and the superb chemistry between tucker and chan in rush hour!

  • Nope (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Cisco Kid (31490) * on Tuesday May 23 2006, @07:39AM (#15386248)
    Well, it appears to be flash based, and while it sort of works, when I tried the laszlomail demo, none of the 'form' fields had labels, eg, I had no idea what to enter in each one. (FireFox, WITH the latest flash plugin, on FC5)

    If it was truly portable, it wouldnt depend on flash. And to be honest, flash is a horrific thing for anything interactive. Its great for cartoons and entertainment, but nothing that you actually need to use for anything serious.
    • Re:Nope by foniksonik (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @09:11AM
      • Re:Nope by The Cisco Kid (Score:2) Wednesday May 24 2006, @08:10AM
        • Re:Nope by foniksonik (Score:2) Wednesday May 24 2006, @09:15AM
          • Re:Nope by The Cisco Kid (Score:2) Wednesday May 24 2006, @11:39AM
            • Re:Nope by SimHacker (Score:3) Wednesday May 24 2006, @12:13PM
            • Re:Nope by foniksonik (Score:2) Wednesday May 24 2006, @02:04PM
    • Re:Nope by freeworld (Score:1) Wednesday May 24 2006, @01:18PM
  • I just wanted to let everyone know that this just an open source competitor to the Adobe Flex product. Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flex is an extremely capable RIA (Rich Internet Applicaiton) toolset that runs within the Flash platform.
    Adobe Flex 2.0 delivers an integrated set of tools and technology enabling developers to build and deploy scalable rich Internet applications. Flex provides a modern, standards-based language supporting common design patterns and includes a client runtime, programming model, development environment, and advanced data services.
    The latest version (Flex 2.0 Beta 3), available at http://labs.adobe.com/ [adobe.com], is freely available to everyone (Although you will need to pay for the development IDE from macromedia if you want it).
    At the core of Flex 2.0 is the Flex framework, which is included with Flex Builder and will also be distributed in the free Flex Software Development Kit (SDK). Using only the free Flex SDK, you can commercially deploy Flex applications that connect to XML and SOAP web services with no additional costs or server licensing required.
    I don't know about everyone else, but I'd rather go with a free framework from the people that created flash, rather than a framework from people that just use flash.
  • Wrong (Score:2)

    by metamatic (202216) on Tuesday May 23 2006, @09:54AM (#15387046)
    (http://www.pobox.com/~meta/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 29 2004, @09:19AM)
    OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for developing user friendly web based applications

    No, it isn't. It's an open source platform for developing user friendly Flash applications.

    • Re:Wrong by jeff_schiller (Score:1) Tuesday May 23 2006, @11:20AM
      • Re:Wrong by metamatic (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @11:29AM
        • Re:Wrong by spoco2 (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @06:29PM
          • Re:Wrong by metamatic (Score:2) Tuesday May 23 2006, @08:59PM
            • Re:Wrong by WWE-TicK (Score:1) Tuesday May 23 2006, @09:13PM
              • Re:Wrong by metamatic (Score:2) Thursday May 25 2006, @12:53PM
  • slow performance (Score:1)

    by istokj (121) on Tuesday May 23 2006, @09:11PM (#15391142)
    (http://piiglobal.com/)
    I'm all for new technology, but I just tried to implement an application using this in the last 4 weeks (instead of Macromedia's Flex) and with 60 or more fields, the performance just in clearing the form was upwards of 30 seconds or more. This technology has potential, but might be a ways off from truly useful enterprise apps.
  • Cooqy [cooqy.com] is an OpenLaszlo eBay interface, which make efficient use of bandwidth, so you can use eBay over a 56k modem. They report that it reduces network traffic by 50x, and it's 2x to 10x faster to use than the html based eBay interface:
    http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/3/prweb356237.h tm [prweb.com]

    It's got a lot of other nice features like mapping, a photo magnifier, tagging, and an advanced search interface, with a trippy lava-lite-esque color selection interface (in case you want to search for purple lava lites).

    -Don

  • by speedbump (11624) on Friday May 26 2006, @02:44PM (#15411920)
    My company took a look at OpenLaszlo, and the developers thought it was going to be the answer to our website make-over, but we found that Laszlo is not quite 'there' yet. Some of the controls are very slow; too slow for serious work. Regretfully, we have decided that we need something a little more mature. We're currently looking at Backbase.
  • by freeworld (672950) on Tuesday May 23 2006, @08:02PM (#15390918)
    How many times do we need to reinvent the wheel, people?
    The obvious answer is "until we get it right." I can only say that your love of Java as a solution to Rich Internet App development must come from never having to actually write and deploy a Java Swing app. (Hint: IT IS A NIGHTMARE.)

    There is far more that can be said in this regard but suffice for now that there is compelling reason to NOT use Java as the "write-once run-anywhere" client it was promised to be.

    [ Parent ]
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