What is OpenLaszlo, and What is it Good For? 196
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."
Drupal (Score:3, Funny)
Mirror up (Score:3, Informative)
Owch! I restarted apache and mysql, made a static text mirror of the drupal page, and RewriteRuled it into place at the original url: http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/124 [donhopkins.com] Now maybe you can fetch the article, I hope.
Sorry about the embarassing Dru Paux.
-Don
Re:Mirror up (Score:2)
Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 (Edit)
Total Score: 2
-1: 134 comments
0: 130 comments
1: 112 comments
2: 81 comments
3: 24 comments
4: 14 comments
5: 10 comments
Hundreds of modpoints assigned, but none to the comment by the author about the accessable status of TFA.
Zero to Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Zero to Slashdotted (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Zero to Slashdotted (Score:3, Funny)
uh...
Re:Zero to Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
That's because slashdoters generally rush over to read TFA and other stuff linked from TFA, so they can post informed and meaningful comments.
I don't mean to troll... (Score:2, Informative)
Work a little harder, learn a little more and create something a lot more intuitive.
yeah man (Score:2)
hyperlinks, tables and full page refreshes were good enough for my grandpappy and they're good enough for me!
Dumbing Down? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dumbing Down? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2, Informative)
Its an XML based programing language, fully OO, using javascript, which is then rendered to target platforms, currently Flash or DHTML.
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2)
-mattew
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2)
How, exactly? It might be redundant, except that, although 'language' appears twice, it's referring to 2 different kinds of language: a "programming language" expressed in a "markup language".
-chris
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2)
And I suppose you prefer the almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-XML based syntax of Cold Fusion?
-Don
Re: I don't mean to troll... (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2)
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. So let's pile on another language to solve this problem. It would be really cool, hip, and exciting, and will be the grand mother of all abstractions, solving all our problems by providing a consistent, smooth interface into all sorts of technologies, ensuring that:
1) Debugging a language change from version x.4.1 to x.4.2 is damn
Re:I don't mean to troll... (Score:2)
It allows you to design interfaces and hook them up to your server side code quite simply (it can simply read and write XML). Layout is XML, logic is Javascript.
Security? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:2)
Re:Security? (Score:2)
Exactly. And how many people has that stopped?
Re:Security? (Score:2)
There are hundreds of other things that people do too, like open urls on arbitrary servers with their php code that aren't safe. That doesn't mean I want the developers to remove the ability to do that when I decide it's safe to do.
Re:Security? (Score:2)
Re:Security? (Score:2)
On the other hand, I would like to see Browser manufacturors add the ability to do cross site calls, but with some security system behind it.
Re:Security? (Score:2)
Oh yeah that's the ticket. I was confused about the XMLHTTPRequest allowing that. Apparently it doesn't let you load XML from different domains, while you CAN load and execute JavaScript from any domain. That's one of the reasons JSON is practical (or subversive).
Isn't it weird that web browsers let you load and execute JavaScript from any domain, but you can't do the same with XML? What's up with that?
-Don
Re:Security? (Score:3, Informative)
The "reason" is just "that's the way Flash is, and Macromedia says it has something to do with security". I'm not claiming that it's a good excuse or a well thought out security model. Most browsers will let you fetch XML from other sites with XMLHTTPRequest, and Flash lets you fetch images from other sites but not XML. I can understand restricting executable SWF files, but Flash never actually executes the XML as code, so I never understood why Flash restricts XML but not images.
Of course OpenLaszlo ap
Re:Security? (Score:3, Informative)
You're not thinking like a malicious hacker. Let's say I want to DDOS example.com. I find some popular webserver that's not exactly secure, lets say newestfad.com. Then I make a comment has a little javascript that requests a large file (or does a database intensive search) from example.com. Now everyone that loads up newestfad.com with my attached comment also loads that file
will it help? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:will it help? (Score:2)
only 32.4% of the total prizes.
Re:will it help? (Score:2)
Re:will it help? (Score:2)
-Chris Knight
Fantastic for thin client development (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yet another non-solution (Score:2)
Flash is just not a suitable host scalable, OS integratable, independent applications. DHTML is just not powerful enough, no matter how fancily you use it. AJAX is just yet another overly complex web-hack, just dressed a bit better than before.
The only real solutions for me are XUL and Vexi [vexi.org]. XUL is limited to Firefox/Mozilla users. You'll be hearing more about Vexi before the year is up.
Re:Yet another non-solution (Score:2)
My audience is 'well to do Internet Explorer users on nearly modern hardware' and the app requires absolutely no OS integration. For that audience Flash is a great container.
But I agree, today Flash/DHTML are almost like Java applets circa 1996. Very geewhiz but offering little outside of their own entertainment value.
Why no Vexi demos? (Score:2)
--------------
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET
Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused
-------------
That kinda sucks. No other demo apps available.
I want to see the power of Vexi, can you show me the way?
Re:Fantastic for skinny client development (Score:2)
Great little machine, I highly recommend it.
Re:Fantastic for skinny client development (Score:2)
OpenLaszlo certainly could target XUL eventually, but the demand for and installed base of Flash and DHTML is much larger, so Laszlo Systems decided to put their resources into targeting those platforms first.
Brendan Eich [mozillazine.org] thinks OpenLaszlo supporting XUL would be a great idea, too. The recent developments for supporting multiple runtimes are intended to make it easier to target XUL and other platforms, and since OpenLaszlo is open source, your contributions towards supporting XUL would certainly be appr
From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:2)
- 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?
- How is performa
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:2)
All I meant regarding the business logic vs. interface was a question of priorities, rather than whether you use an MVC-style architecture. It was largely another wording for the adjacent question, as in: Does Lazlo force you to spend more time on the UI than on business-level features?
That can be a concern depending on your market, so a lot of people either blindly believe that the UI doesn't matter or is overly important. I was trying to gauge how much emphasis your company put on UI work (and
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:2)
I would argue that that's a dangerous approach: If you have a single UI for two platforms with radically different display sizes, it's liable to be difficult to use on one or both. Not necessarily true for sites and very simple apps, but as you get into complex applications I think it would be a p
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:2)
I beg to differ (Score:2)
Re:I beg to differ (Score:2)
Have there been painful experiences with it as we've gone along? Oh hell yeah, but I've had that with every language I've ever coded in (Which is up to... hmmm... Dunno... like 9 or so now?). Refresh issues were a big pain, and probably will be a bit again, but there are ways to mitigate those
Re:I beg to differ (Score:2)
For about four months, say starting a year ago. Version 3.1 is still installed on my box, though I started with 3.0 IIRC.
I wanted to do things a little bit differently than the API allowed at the time. I do note that some of these features are now implemented and I do intend to revisit it (the whole project is on the back burner at the mom
Re:From a year long coder in Laszlo (Score:4, Informative)
Lazlo is quite cool (Score:2)
Any one else think... (Score:2)
Re:Any one else think... (Score:2)
OpenLaszlo's potential goes beyond the web (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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.
Re:OpenLaszlo's potential goes beyond the web (Score:2)
The great news is, the way they are going, you won't have to. Right now Laslo interpretes the code to DHTML and Flash.I hope someday they do a XUL port as well. But anyway you look at it, you will be able to at least code your app in something friendlier then Javascript, and relegate Javascript to just simple glue and scripts, what it was design
Re:OpenLaszlo's potential goes beyond the web (Score:2)
You don't need Flash any more if you're willing to give up the advanced functionality, speed, and expect various quirks to pop-up in the different browsers you'll run it in.
Right now the DHTML version is a lot slower than Flash 7's version. And given the massive rendering and script running speed improvements of Flash 9 (Flex 2 targets), you can expect the difference to be even more drastic.
Re:OpenLaszlo's potential goes beyond the web (Score:3, Insightful)
Other then that the same idea though. If you don't want to tell some of your customers to go away because they chose a different browser or a different operating system then you then you should use a technology that is supported by everybody.
Re:OpenLaszlo's potential goes beyond the web (Score:2)
Resources Galore on OpenLaszlo Here (Score:5, Informative)
Laszlo and Dojo Announce Strategic AJAX Partnership [sys-con.com]
Laszlo AJAX Platform To Support Flash, DHTML,
Interview with Jim Grandy of Laszlo Systems at the Real-World AJAX Seminar in San Jose [sys-con.tv]
OpenLazlo.org crashes Firefox (Score:2)
Re:OpenLazlo.org crashes Firefox (Score:2)
In fact, Firefox 1.5 seems to be their reference platform for the initial DHTML version (which is newer [openlaszlo.org] than the Flash front-end), though they plan to target Firefox and IE, and are "reasonably confident" about Opera and Safari. I tried their DHTML demo (a photo management app) in Opera 9 beta 1, and while parts of it worked, it wouldn't actually display any of the thumbnails. Eh, beta browser plus beta site.
Anyway, you might want to check your spelling: it's www.openl [openlaszlo.org]
Re:OpenLazlo.org crashes Firefox (Score:2)
Huh! Good God! (Score:2)
Say it again y'all.
While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a major and important difference between Flex and OpenLaszlo: Flex is designed to lock you into Flash, and OpenLaszlo is designed to free you from Flash and enable you to deploy your application on other runtimes like DHTML. Also, OpenLaszlo is true Open Source Software, and FLEX is not. FLEX has some strict licensing restrictions about how you can use it, how you can modify it, and what you can the source code.
Why do you say that Flex 2 applications run much faster? They're both running on the same Flash player. The main overhead is rendering graphics on the screen, followed by interpreting the SWF byte codes. Why should FLEX applications be any faster then OpenLaszlo applications? What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
Are there any application as complex as Laszlo Mail [laszlomail.com] implemented FLEX? Can you point us to any FLEX applications of similar complexity that we can test drive, and compare the speed for ourselves?
-Don
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Can I get commit access to their svn repo? Who owns the code I contribute to OpenLaszlo?
Why do you say that Flex 2 applications run much faster? They're both running on the same Flash player.
Actually Flex 2 applications utilize the new VM in Flash 9 which in a number of benchmarks shows performance improvements of 10x to 100x.
What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
There is a lot to cover here and I'm off to see a movie in a f
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Your contributor faq [openlaszlo.org] doesn't indicate commit access, only that patches must be submitted via email. Not quite "true open source".
Are you implying that I could get commit access to the Flex codebase? Or that Flex is open source? What are you implying?
I am not trying to imply that Flex is more "open" than Laszlo, rather that Laszl
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
As long as people on the FLEX team are fact-checking, could you people please correct the mis-impression that FLEX is "*FREE*"? Surely Adobe doesn't want to encourage software piracy of their products. Unbundling the SDK and giving that away under certain conditions, doesn't make the whole system free, like the entire OpenLaszlo system really and totally is. I can download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK for free too, but that doesn't mean I can pirate the entire source code of the Microsoft w
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Totally incorrect. FLEX 1 creates Flash 7 apps, and thus is limited to what Flash 7 offers. FLEX 2 targets the upcoming Flash 9 player (currently in public beta).
The features Flash
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
The OpenLaszlo compiler is being rewritten to support the more efficient Flash 9 runtime, as well as other runtimes like DHTML/AJAX:
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Legals_Project [openlaszlo.org]
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Legals_Project_Plan [openlaszlo.org]
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
This is silly. This is like complaining about how Ajax frameworks lock you into XmlHTTPRequest (which BTW is not a standard and only exists because Microsoft added it to the browser).
And how did you make the conceptual leap from "more affordable pricing" to "*FREE*"?
Ummm, maybe because the Flex SDK that does everything Laszlo can do and more IS FREE [adobe.com].
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
It's not silly at all -- you're just not thinking out of "Flash -vs- AJAX" box. The new version of OpenLaszlo IS an AJAX frameword that gives you independence from XMLHTTPRequest, because you can compile your OpenLaszlo programs for DHTML (using XMLHTTPRequest) or Flash (using a different Flash based mechanism to download and process XML). It provides a higher level (and more powerful, easier to use) abstraction than XMLHTTPRequest, instead of exposing the low level implementation details directly.
OpenL
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Because it's free. The compiler and the framework is free as in beer: for commercial and non-commercial projects, forever.
The IDE is sub $1000, but you can expect plenty of free IDE-s to pop-up that use the compiler, just like it happened with the free
I won't even comment on the "it locks you" argument, but you probably realize that in your quest to put Flex in a bad light you've written few quite ridiculous
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
"*FREE*" does not mean "free (for non-commercial use only) (sub $1000) (plus an unannounced but high per-server licensing fee)". How much will Adobe charge for the server license? Have they told you, and are you under NDA? Please answer the price question, before claiming it's "*FREE*".
FLEX certainly does lock you into Flash. Why is this so hard for some people to understand? OpenLaszlo will support DHTML as well as other runtimes. OpenLaszlo's runtime-independence is quite an important point. Not every
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Dude, why don't you spend some time researching instead of ranting. Flex 2 doesn't need a server nor does its framework, it produces standalone SWF files you can deploy on a server of your desire.
The compiler/framework and the rest of the SDK is not "free non-commercial sub $1000" it's "free commercial or non-commercial $0", get it?
How much will Adobe charge for the server license?
Re:While you wait for a mirror... (Score:2)
Adobe has unbundled parts of FLEX (in reaction to OpenLaszlo), but it's still not all free, and parts of it are quite expensive, their prices not even announced. How can you claim something's free when Adobe hasn't even announce the price (but we all know it's greater than zero)? Microsoft's .NET Framework SDK is also "free", but not their web server and programming environment, and the source code isn't available.
All parts of OpenLaszlo, including complete source code for the compiler and server, is to
Re:Obnoxious Perpetuation of Flash as a web UI (Score:2)
I mean really, this outright hatred of Flash is ridiculous. In our case we are coding an application for use within Businesses. What this allows us to do is to not have to install any client on their pcs, not have to worry about getting updates to them, as we just update our servers with the latest version, and next time they load the app, it's brand new.
By rendering to flash you remove almost 100% of the issues of cross browser in
well (Score:2)
haXe is a unified Flash, DHTML & AJAX solution (Score:2)
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
Re:haXe is a unified Flash, DHTML & AJAX solut (Score:2)
Interesting concept, but until I see it proven in practice, I'm not going to spend much time on it!
One major shortcoming. (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Our web based diagram editor:
http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/ [gliffy.com]
Chris Kohlhardt
Co-founder, Gliffy Inc.
Re:We wrote Gliffy in Laszlo... (Score:2)
(Score:3, Interesting)
by vidog (83824) Alter Relationship on Monday May 22, @10:57PM (#15385157)
(http://www.vidog.com/)
Our web based diagram editor:
http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/ [gliffy.com]
Very nice! I just had a quick go and it seems like a very nice little diagram editor. What are the plans for the future - pay version? Advertising on the site? In the diagrams?
Thanks
Chris
Re:We wrote Gliffy in Laszlo... (Score:2)
Bert
Just the tool for creating SUBSCRIPTION software? (Score:2, Interesting)
COMIX on LAZSLO (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Nope (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
This isn't 'Flash' based... it is SWF based which means it is a Flash player compatible version of SVG which is an XML language for vector graphics.... similar to PDF which is what OS X uses for displaying it's UI.
Not suitable for anything serious? Adobe's Flex 2 will prove you wrong. To date it is already being used in Government applications as a front end for DB manipulation and queries.
Open
Re:Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
Kid, you are completely missing the point. Go back and read the fucking article [donhopkins.com]. OpenLaszlo is a high level XML/JavaScript based language that COMPILES into SWF, and now also COMPILES into DHTML/JavaScript. It's INDEPENDENT of Flash, because it targets other runtimes, including browsers WITHOUT the Flash plug-in.
Your misunderstanding is like complaining that C++ locks you into 68000 machine language, because the first version of CGG initially targeted 68k. C++ is a (moderately) high level language that
Wrong (Score:2)
No, it isn't. It's an open source platform for developing user friendly Flash applications.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Perhaps you missed that I talked about what it is, not what it may one day be.
When it produces XHTML + ECMAscript applications, I might be interested.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
IT's there! It's in pre-beta, you can see it works.
Re:HUH! Yeah, absolutely nothing, listen to me (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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
Re:HUH! Yeah, absolutely nothing, listen to me (Score:2)
Because they aren't actually programmers. They're kids, hobbyists, and students who want people to see how smart they are, have never written commercial code, and ignore or are unaware of such all-important factors as maintainability and time to market. There's a reason no one pays money for someone to sit there and write PS2 code in vi (as you pointed out), but they can't quite grasp what that reason is.
Re:HUH! Yeah, absolutely nothing, listen to me (Score:2)
Programming OpenLaszlo compared to writing raw DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX is like the difference between writing assembly language, and writing in a high level language like Python or Lisp.
It saves you a lot of time, and enables you to write and configure reusable components instead of re-inventing the wheel each time.
-Don
Re:HUH! Yeah, absolutely nothing, listen to me (Score:2)
Sorry for the backwards metaphore. I meant OpenLaszlo is to raw DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX as Lisp/Python/etc are to Assembly Language.
-Don
Wrong layer (Score:2)
Now does every site need to worry about the drooling Slashdot hords when 99.999 percent of all their other traffic is handled perfectly by their existing setup? Nope.
Kind Regards