There's a few major issues we encountered when trying to build desktop-style applications in OL.
1) Memory usage can get out of control VERY fast if you're not careful. We had a OL tabbed form app (6 tabs) that when running in the browser, used over 100MB according to taskmanager. This is the browser + flash player + laszlo app. There were no imbedded sounds or videos or anything of that nature, just lots of OL controls, particularly combo boxes. Needless to say, when an app is this large, it is unusably slow. The "datacombobox" control has helped a LOT with this problem but I think the whole platform has a long way to go before it can be used to replace desktop applications. Memory usage in general needs to be brought way down. Even if it's at the expense of things like rounded buttons and drop shadows on controls. I'd like to see a set of "light" controls added to OL that are stripped down to the minimum number of resources and views necessary to do the job. Drop all the "bells and whistles" and focus on low memory usage and performance. 2) UI flow control and validation. It's difficult in OL to force the user to progress through a complex application in a linear fashion, especially when program flow needs to be halted due to invalid input. There was a "shouldYieldFocus" method added that helps with this somewhat but it's still rough. The whole problem requires a re-think of the way that applications are designed when there is a lot of input that needs to be validated before progressing forward. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Pence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 12:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Laszlo-user] Big pluses and minuses of using Laszlo? I recall Geert Bevin had a great write-up of some of the issues he had, good and bad, in developing with Laszlo. I have Googled, but cannot find this. Does anyone know the article I am talking about? I don't want to just present a sunny-side-up view of Laszlo for the Ruby on Rails conference. Would anyone like to share your list of gotchas with OL that you would think that someone should be aware of before jumping in? Any non-trivial platform has its issues, I just want to do the conference attendees the service of presenting a balanced view. Thanks in advance. Mike Pence _______________________________________________ Laszlo-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-user _______________________________________________ Laszlo-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-user
