What market research?
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Ryan R. LaMothe
On Mar 3, 2010, at 7:49 AM, P T Withington wrote:
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.
