> > Could somebody please give me a good reason to use laszlo!?! :-) > > - rami >
I'd like to add that while I have not directly developed any huge applications in Laszlo, I've been supporting such efforts, and I'm always amazed at the applications people have been able to develop. Especially given what should be deficiencies in the support for conventional 'programming in the large' features, such as namespaces, interfaces, dynamically unloadable modules, etc. When the Dojo toolkit came out a few years ago, I took a closer look at it, and was wondering if that was the future of Ajax development. It seemed like having a loose collection of Ajax facilities might be a more modular and maintainable way to build large custom apps. But then I saw that as people tried to make real applications, rather than just enhancing a conventional web page with better GUI components, they eventually ran into all the same issues that we had run into earlier, and in some cases they were taken by surprise and their infrastructure had to be crammed in some directions that they hadn't anticipated. They tried to avoid the need for a complex pre-compiler or pre-processor, and ended up having to add more and more complexity to that, to the point where I wouldn't really call it a pure toolkit anymore, but more of a compiler with the same issues as the LZX compiler/pre-processor. And maybe they were in a worse position because they were then in the position of trying to add to the complexity of this pre-processing phase at runtime rather than compile time. So the lesson from that was that the grass is not so much greener on the other side of the fence. The 'best' structure of an RIA app is still a moving target. We have to constantly look at what new features have emerged, and when they are ubiquitous enough to try and incorporate them into the platform. But the basic architecural model that OpenLaszlo has for what an RIA app looks like still seems to still be working.
