>
>Laszlo is a Flash competitor and may also be a competitor to MM Flex
>nee Royale.
>
I'm not sure it's a competitor to Flash, seeing as it compiles its file to
the SWF format. If anything, it *uses* Flash as its presentation technology.
However, Laszlo is a direct competitor to Flex. Actually, I'd say it's the
other way around, seeing as Lazlo's been around for a few years now and Flex
isn't even at 1.0 yet.
>I am not sure of the latter because I have not seen either Flex or
>Royale.
Me either.
>
>Laszlo is used, like Flash, to create the client side of RIA apps.
>
>Laszlo code is written in XML and _javascript_ as opposed to the
>Movie/ActionScript construct of Flash.
I think that this is a key statement because it allows new developers to
leverage existing knowledge as opposed to having to learn yet another
language.
>
>Laszlo code is compiled into a Flash swf file and imbedded into an HTML
>page just as Flash is.
This is why I don't see it being a competitor to Flash itself, but rather
Flex.
>I think I like it.
Me too. Hopefully Flex takes the strengths of Laszlo and other similar
products and improves on the developer and client experience.
>It is much more intuitive (to me) than the Flash paradigm.
>
>They have a very nice sample shopping cart ala PetStore with a few
>added goodies -- you can drag and drop items (images) to the cart or
>wish list.
>
If you want a good real-world example of Laszlo in action, Howard Dean's
campaign calendar uses Laszlo for its presentation, and I think it's a
pretty solid little app:
http://cal.deanforamerica.com:8080/lps-1.0.2/calendar/index.html
>
>Now the negatives:
>
>I found a bug in the client side of the data maintenance example
>(above) that I can't resolve -- their debugger isn;t much help.
Well, as it will be the first release, I'm sure Flex will have its growing
pains as well!!
>Performance appears to be a little sluggish
Since the SWF is run client-side, is it your machine? What sort of machine
are you running? All the samples I've run from their site (and others like
the Howard Dean calendar above) run smoothly for me.
>The client-side code is 163K (gzipped) which seems high -- I have not
>used their optimizer
Do you mean the final SWF that gets transferred? Or the file that creates
the SWF file (akin to Flash's FLA file)? Just curious. Also, I'd be curious
to see how this changes once you use their optimizer.
>I hate typing Laszlo
I just found that out too!
>Anyway, this might be a good alternative to Flash for those of us who
>are uneasy with Flash model.
>
I think, if nothing else, it's a great indication of what can be done with
programmatic Flash. RIA development legitimately opens up to a whole new
developer community who are used to coding (not that it's closed by any
means now, but it's a slightly different pardigm). I also think Laszlo/Flex
will be 2 of several driving forces behind the next generation of RIA
development (Microsoft's Avalon being another one that comes to mind, but
only God knows when that'll be available!).
Regards,
Dave.
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