On 2010-02-28, at 02:51, [email protected] wrote: > I've been using OpenLaszlo for about 6 months now, so I am certainly not an > expert. And I don't want to sound like a complainer. But I must say, I am > REALLY baffled at the lack of a full-featured IDE (or plugin) for OpenLaszlo. > I really like OL, and I want to develop with it. But the lack of IDE > support is really a drawback, compared to other current development > environments . And I have seen this sentiment mentioned frequently by > others. With the seemingly-strong community out there, I would expect a > nice full-featured IDE available, sponsored by OL.
OpenLaszlo is sponsored primarily by Laszlo Systems. Laszlo Systems uses OpenLaszlo as a platform for a number of commercial projects. I think Laszlo would create an IDE if it made business sense for them, but it seems it does not: Their own developers have not expressed a need for an IDE, and their market research indicates that they would not be able to recoup the cost of creating and IDE. There actually have been several efforts to create an IDE, but the previous two reasons have prevented anything from ever being completed. I'll also echo Norm's comment: visual layout editors are only one approach to the problem (and not clearly the best approach). Once you start thinking about your problem more abstractly, I think you will find that it is easy (and more robust) to express your layout in terms of constraints. We've all run across (unresizable) dialog boxes that looked great on the 640x480 screen they were visually "designed" on but are now unusably microscopic on today's high-pixel-count displays.
