Sun and Laszlo announce Orbit: OpenLaszlo for J2ME

SimHacker writes "Sun and Laszlo Systems have announced project "Orbit": OpenLaszlo for J2ME. OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install 'AJAX' web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. The OpenLaszlo 'Legals' project supports multiple deployment runtimes, including Flash and DHTML, and soon J2ME! The FAQ says a proof-of-concept demo will be available later this year."

eh....

[Joffy]

I didn't put much time or effort into this, but if you make "hello" and "world" different colors they overlap each other. I actually had to specify "world"'s x and y cooridinates to adjust the spacing. I'm by no means a content creator of any sort other than an occasional whim, but this seems like it would become very tedious. Is there something i'm missing such as an IDE that would make this trvial?

Re:eh....

[gse]

LZX != HTML at all.
you don't get any layout by default; though you could declare a simplelayout to get what you want:

<canvas>
<simplelayout axis="x"/>
<text>hello</text>
<text>world</text>

it's really a different world than HTML authoring; it's application development. this stuff becomes very natural after a bit, and i find it much more pleasant than any other GUI creation frameworks i've used.

(disclaimer: i'm a developer for laszlo systems, but i mean what i write above.)

Declaring layouts in OpenLaszlo

[SimHacker]

Assuming that you used two different text elements, each with its own fgcolor, then my guess is that you need a layout to position the text objects one after the other -- otherwise they all are positioned at x="0" y="0" by default, so they overlap like this [donhopkins.com] (source [donhopkins.com]).

You can put a layout element into a canvas or view, like <simplelayout axis="x"/>, and it magically positions its siblings (the text elements) like this [donhopkins.com] (source [donhopkins.com]). There are even more powerful layouts like the <wrappinglayout/> that work like this [donhopkins.com] (source [donhopkins.com]). [Try resizing the window -- it's very xmasy!]

Another way to make a text element with two different colors is to change the colors with html, using <font color="#ff0000"> tags in the text, like this [donhopkins.com] (source [donhopkins.com]).

-Don