On 2010-01-26, at 05:51, Rami Ojares wrote: > Could somebody please give me a good reason to use laszlo!?! :-)
_I_ believe that OpenLaszlo, as a language and framework, has some unique and powerful aspects that are not duplicated by your average AJAX framework: * declarative programming * classes and mixins * "instance first" programming * data binding * replication * constraints * animators * states These high-level features give the programmer greater leverage than straight AJAX programming, and they are the reason I would choose OpenLaszlo. If you just want to write a few web pages with slide-out menus, sortable columns, etc. you can drop in any old AJAX library and sprinkle a little Javascript around. If you want to write web applications, I think your framework choices are far more limited. When I compare what small teams are able to do with OpenLaszlo to what is done by (apparently gigantic) teams in other frameworks, I have an inkling that there is inherent power in OpenLaszlo that is not there in other frameworks. By supporting 3+ runtime platforms, we have proven that OpenLaszlo can evolve to track the latest and greatest runtimes while still supporting legacy runtimes. In other words, the power of the framework does not depend on advanced or proprietary runtimes, but it also can take advantage of those, when they become generally available. There are deficits in OpenLaszlo: The component set is stale, does not take advantage of CSS, is hard to extend. This is our current focus. Also, the community and development group are small, limiting how quickly OpenLaszlo can evolve. This should be the focus of the community, users, and customers -- it is in their best interest to see OpenLaszlo grow. --- Above is essentially a view from the top down. What is inherent in OpenLaszlo that makes it a worthwhile tool. I think Raju's purpose in starting this thread was to ask a bottom-up question: What is the philosophy of OpenLaszlo on surfacing new and exciting features from the underlying runtimes as they advance? My answer there is that OpenLaszlo has _always_ allowed you to directly call the underlying runtime (at your own risk). But also, we want to adopt new technologies as they become widely available and standardized. We want to do this in a runtime-independent way if possible, but (repeating myself) strike a balance that is beyond the lowest common denominator, gracefully degrading when full cross-platform support is not available. I'd also like to see us make it more straightforward for external developers to do this themselves: to add to the core API of OpenLaszlo in a way that can be shared, tested, evolved and eventually incorporated back in to OpenLaszlo. Right now, it takes a bit of wizardry to work on core features, but we hope our open process will make this plausible and possible.
