1. Ease of coding
I stopped working on Flex when the IDE (FlexBuilder) was still built on
top of the Dreamweaver code-base. That IDE was pretty slow. It was
easy to do easy things and really painful to do more complex things. I
ended up using a text editor most of the time. Integrates well with
version repositories. Great for team development.
OpenLaszlo had an Eclipse-based IDE that I also found useful for making
small applications but the IDE ran slower than I think. So I switched
to emacs and find that terrific for rapid application development. It's
probably not as good for somebody who's used to doing, say, VisualBasic
development. Integrates well with version repositories. Great for
team development.
Flash - awesome vector drawing tool. Top-notch timeline-based IDE.
Code can go anywhere and everywhere. Made me laugh, made me cry. I'm
so glad I don't do much development in the Flash IDE. I still like it
for creating assets & making animations, though.
2. Development time
I haven't written much Flex code in the last 3 years but I think that
Flex and Laszlo are equivalent here. It might be easier to integrate
Flex with Coldfusion or JRun back-ends because they're made by the same
company. I'm a big fan of RESTful APIs.
I think that Open Laszlo and Flex are equivalent here.
For Flash it depends on the scale of what you're doing.
Actually this is true for all technologies. For OpenLaszlo it's easy to
do small to middle-sized applications and more challenging to do large
apps. IMHO, in Flash it's easy to do small applications and much more
challenging to middle to large apps.
3. Fun factor
OpenLaszlo
OpenLaszlo
OpenLaszlo
4. "Pull-your-hair-out" factor (encountering/diagnosing/overcoming
strange architectural quirks)
OpenLaszlo and Flex are pretty equivalent. Multi-person development &
source control with Flash applications feels like passing MS Word files
around for revision control.
5. Any other differentiating factors?
OpenLaszlo is Free. OpenLaszlo-generated apps can run on iPhones.
OpenLaszlo isn't tied to the (most recent or any other) Flash Player.
For ease of comparison, let's assume that in the case of Laszlo, we're
targeting the Flash runtime.
Well that's no fun.
-e
