That's one way to look at it. The other is: how many people have stopped using OpenLaszlo since there are no better tools available. And then, how many more people would use it and even buy Webtop if there was better tool support for the platform.
The "problem" is: if more companies would use OpenLaszlo how would Laszlo financially profit from that? It looks like Laszlo isn't willing to invest into an IDE to drive adoption of OpenLaszlo. I've been working on a Webtop project for a very large company in Europe in the past months. They are already talking about replacing Webtop with a technology which has a larger developer base: Flex or a combination of Flash/Ajax. Maybe it's different in the US, but in Europe you'll have a hard time selling OpenLaszlo based products with the tiny developer community we have here. I believe it's a mistake to not spend the money on an IDE, with a visual builder, without a visual builder I don't care. Look at mobile app development: iPhone, Android, Palm webOS: good tools and IDEs everywhere. Xcode, Eclipse plug-ins, and even cool concept like the complete browser based IDE Palm came up with. As cool as the LZX language and the OpenLaszlo compiler are, having to learn a new language without good IDE support is something many developers and project managers don't accept any more. At least step-through debugging is a must-have, even for script languages. Raju ------------------------ -----Original Message----- From: "Ryan R. LaMothe" <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 08:02:49 To: P T Withington<[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Laszlo-user] Full-featured IDE for OpenLaszlo? What market research? -- 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.
