On Feb 2, 2007, at 6:46 PM, Rob Laveaux wrote:
Next, Swordfish is great. I would love to see Swordfish. But
swordfish is almost entirely for writing the server side of a web
application. I'm after a way to write the client side.
Such tools already exist. Have a look at Adobe Flex. It is Flash
for application developers. The IDE is based on Eclipse and runs on
Mac and Windows. It contains a GUI builder, an advanced code
editor, debugger etc. It comes with many pre-built user interface
widgets to create a rich user interface. It uses two programming
languages: MXML and ActionScript. MXML is an XML based language,
which is mostly used for declarative things such as describing the
user interface, transitions, data binding etc. For more advanced
logic you use ActionScript (version 3.0) which is a very complete
programming language with features similar to Java.
FlexBuilder (the IDE) is a commercial product, but not that
expensive (about $500). The compiler and the framework are
available for free. The compiler is a command line tool.
The entire product goes way beyond OpenLaszlo and does not require
any special software on the server side. You can use any
programming language for the back end. Usually you communicate with
the back end using SOAP or HTTP/XML requests. But there is also a
binary format called AMF that can automatically serialize objects
from the client to the server and vice versa and call remote
methods. Also I think that Flex will have a much broader community
support, simply because Adobe is a big company with more influence
on the software industry.
Since the source files are plain text and since the compiler can be
called from the command line, you can use RB to create Flash files
without using any plugins. Such an approach would be much more
capable and stable than using Ming.
I had once written a 4D plugin for Ming, just as an experiment. I
did not continue the product as it was impossible for me to get it
stable enough for production use. It was full of memory leaks.
Fixing those would be a major undertaking. This was about 3 years
ago, at a time where the Ming project was almost abandoned. The
situation might have improved since then, I don't know. But still,
I think that using Flex would be a better idea.
Thanks for that, Rob.
I've not used Flex, but the tools for OpenLaszlo are actually pretty
good, and I have a preference for open source kits.
I can write software using OpenLaszlo, but if it needs to do some
version of what a REALbasic application is already doing, I need to
rewrite from scratch in OL (or Flex).
I'm looking for a way to do what Flex/OpenLaszlo do, without having
to rewrite from scratch. I'm convinced this would be a compelling
advantage for REALbasic, and for me in my development work.
I also think this fits in with REALbasic's existing compelling
advantage: that it is cross-platform. As I said previously in this
thread, I think there are better tools for writing desktop
applications on each of the target platforms, but there is no other
high-level way to write cross-platform software. This is what keeps
me using REALbasic, and adding flash app generation to the mix would
be a natural extension of this.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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