At 11:58 AM 7/10/2007, Andrew McLaughlin wrote:
I'm just starting out on a pretty ambitious project to develop a sales order entry Laszlo app (interfacing to MySQL via JSP). Laszlo will be used strictly in an Ajax mode in that all data will be loaded on the fly from the service, displaying a pop up list of parts as they enter items or descriptions, showing the unit and extended price as they enter values and even checking stock and showing if a line item will be backordered once committed.
Not too different from what we've already been doing for about 3 months now for one of our clients.
So far, I'm totally confident in what it will take to build the middle and back tiers, however I'm a little concerned regarding Laszlo. Heretofore, I would have built this using straight Struts, but wanted to give the client a little more bang for the buck.
Absolutely - something like struts is going to be very slow coding and this will give a much better look and feel as well.
Question is: Is there any sort of GUI dev tool to layout the Laszlo widgets or is it all hand XML coding?
Check in the list archives, this was a long discussion back in April about Laszlo's direction now that Version 4 was delivered. A solid IDE is high on that list. It seems there was an IBM sponsored project in Eclipse at one point but that died out, was no longer maintained, and got stale. There are some places where the code seems to be still around, but I could never get it running even with the specific versions of older Eclipse it supposedly required. There is an editor more than a full IDE. (it doesn't do visual layout, but it does have full drag and drop of code blocks for each widget) It's an eclipse plugin from Spket (www.spket.com) which gives a tree view of the code, color coded syntax, code completion, etc. all the things you'd expect from eclipse - it just doesn't visualize the code for you to do layout. That said - my impression doing a lot more Laszlo now than I did when that first thread happened, I understand why not everyone is just clamoring for the visual layout tool. As long as you want simple sets of values to edit they're usually layed out evenly spaced on the y axis, and occasionally along the x. If you simply group each set of values into its own view, and drop a <simplelayout> in the view, Laszlo does all the work for you.
Is there at least a XSD or even a DTD that I can leverage to speed up the effort?
Yes, it's already in the distribution, look under the "tools" directory where you'll find lzx.xsd. There are also some other formats of the grammar, and even a file for vim and one for emacs. (.el) ======================================================================= Geoff Crawford Phone: (973) 361 - 4224 Innov8 Computer Solutions, LLC FAX: (973) 537 - 6946 711 Route 10 East, Suite 204 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Randolph NJ 07869 Web: http://www.processwareerp.com ProcessWare ERP for the Chemical Industry
