Excellent post!
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I use IntelliJ IDEA for all my
development. I've tried using Eclipse, and it just seems too bizarre
for me to comprehend. At any rate, having the XSD will help
tremendously as at least it will show me all optional and required
attributes for each tag.
I like how each part of the layout is organized in nested views and
will make heavy use of that. Can you recommend a good structure for
each lzx file? I sure wish that Laszlo in Action were already in
print. Reading docs online can be a drag sometimes... :)
Andrew
On Jul 10, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Geoff Crawford wrote:
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project in Eclipse at one point but that died out, was no longer
maintained, and got stale.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)
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Geoff Crawford Phone: (973) 361 -
4224
Innov8 Computer Solutions, LLC FAX: (973) 537 -
6946
711 Route 10 East, Suite 204 Email:
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Randolph NJ 07869 Web: http://
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