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What is OpenLaszlo, and What is it Good For?
SimHacker writes to share an article he wrote recently that tries to answer the question; What is OpenLaszlo, and What is it Good For? From the article: "OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for developing user friendly web based applications, which work identically across all popular browsers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc). It's ideal for presenting and editing raw XML data generated by PHP and other web services."
That cross dressing site management software "Drupal" says too many connections.
Zero to slashdotted in no comments flat.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Sometimes I find this AJAX movement annoying. Not because of the new technologies emerging, and not because of the amount of people wanting to learn it. I find it more annoying because of the whole dumbing down initiative.
Work a little harder, learn a little more and create something a lot more intuitive.
The solution is for the OpenLaszlo Server or PHP to act as a proxy for other servers.
Isn't there a reason for that? I would like to see something that specifically addresses the security issues here...
Of course it generates everyone's favourite whipping boy. Flash!
Google Cache anonymous and all that
Will it help me win all the prizes in a big sweepstakes?
This guy's the limit!
I don't know what it is good for, but I'd have to say its not good for:
Sites that you might want to withstand a slashdotting.
Seriously never seen a site down so fast, the first comment was about how it was slashdotted.
Seriously, the summary lacks something... like "how does this differ from Emacs/VI"? I can edit HTML or XML just fine in Emacs or VI. I can run them on just about any platform in existance. The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.
With apologies to Edwin Starr.
Since Laszlo apps can be output either as DHTML or as SWF contained content it works wonders for embedded development.
I'm building a small embedded linux based system to handle my A/V switching infrastructure in my home. The box itself can be considered a toaster, very much like a LinkSys router. Combining thttpd, Ruby (small footprint with Ruby2exe) serving POX(Plain Ole XML) and then Laszlo as the SWF contained client I can provide a hugely rich experience for the user on my minimalistic embedded platform.
The Eclipe IDE tools are 'Ok' and do the job well enough at the start but you'll need to tweak it a bit more to get a really solid look.
Overall this is a fantastic alternative to Adobe Flex in many ways, particularly in its openness, huge community support and low/no cost. Flex 2.0 is also low low cost now but we will see how that plays out.
So, for me Laszlo is Rich App on a thin client primarily. Very nice.
as others have reported, it's already slashdotted. coral cache has the same page (http://www.donhopkins.com.nyud.net:8080/drupal/no de/124)
but, is this maybe it?
Xatrix Security - Computer Security news portal
Okay, is like no one going to make the connection between GTA3's Laszlo from Chatterbox and this so-called "OpenLaszlo"? I think I'm going to call in and tell him about this!
Drag and drop and accordion panes are totally unintuitive.
hyperlinks, tables and full page refreshes were good enough for my grandpappy and they're good enough for me!
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Here's a google cache link, seeing as mirrordot didn't get it in time.
: www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:1LG-XvkuOI8J
Firstly, Google cache.
:)
I've been coding in Laszlo for almost a year now for a new product my company is launching soon, and I have to say it's a great language to use. A very easy way to create great web applications while still being able to write completely Object Orientated code... There's absolutely zero need to code in a WYSIWYG style method ala visual basic or the like, our application dynamically loads in its objects and layout from a db, completely configurable... it's all very nice.
The article itself is quite a nice summary of what Laszlo is I suppose. It does seem to harp on a bit about PHP as a back end, when there is nothing tying laszlo to php at all... we were using Ruby, now we're using Java, and are able o talk directly to Java classes from within Laszlo code using a JavaRPC structure. As the Laszlo server is a Java app, it all sits together nicely.
Also it's good to see it mentioning the alternate runtime of DHTML which is currently able to be played with at Openlaszlo.org (currently in pre-beta). So, in the future you'll be able to write your code and chose to render it to Flash OR DHMTL or Both... it's all very nice.
Is there anything that people who are interesting in Laszlo would like to know from someone who's been coding in it for a while? As while I'm not a zealot of it or anything, I do like it a lot, and just would love to see as many people as possible using it.
From my tinkering with it a few years ago, its really quite a neat little sandbox develop neat little web componants (flash based or dhtml based) from xml feeds. To me, it kinda seemed like a neat 'OSX Dashboard' concept for the web. People could develop neat UI interfaces fed by xml data, and those componants could be shared, or forked, or what have you.
"Old man yells at systemd"
That Open Lazlo was an open source project to easily fillout those, no purchase neccessary, enter as often as you like, sweepstakes entry forms?
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
"So, for me Laszlo is Rich App on a thin client primarily. Very nice."
:) Seriously I see this running on one of those reflashed Linksys NAS servers. The back-end is talking with everything else on the local net, and the front-end can either be a browser, or Macromedia's stand-alone player.*
Hey! Give me back my words.
*There's also one thing no one has done yet. Get Laszlo to spit out XUL.
To me, OpenLaszlo is not about the web. If you think about what it does, it allow syou to specify a complete user interface and logic in an XML file. The layout is done with XML, and the logic is done with ECMAScript (yes, that's what JavaScript became).
The first OpenLaszlo solution compiled this XML into Flash which can run in any browser. Then they made a new compiler which turns it into DHTML so youd on't need Flash any more. So now you can take the same application written once (as an LZX XML file) and compile it to Flash or DHTML and get the same behavior. Both of those are very ubiquitous mediums. If you read their roadmap, they also have plans for Java client.
My hope is that one day, there will just be clients that read the LZX XML directly. These clients could be written in Java, .NET, TclTk, C++, you name it. They would all read the same LZX XML and render it for the user. That's very much how various different browsers all read the same HTML file and render it. So you might be thinking that its no better than HTML, but:
If I had to pick a solution for the world to use for rich internet applications, I'd choose OpenLaszlo over Java Applets, Java WebStart, Macromedia Flex, DHTML, etc.
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
When you say "Dumbing Down" do you mean making it usable? Are you the same guy that uses vi because it does the same thing as notepad? Usability creates acceptance. There is no reason to make things complicated if they don't have to be. As a fairly literate computer user, I still want simple things to be simple to do.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
PHP is not a web service.
Its not edit, like YOU edit the XML, its edit as in have non-programmers edit data. You can use Lazlo to build web apps using SWF or DHTML for the view layer, and from my experience, Lazlo is makes quite a nifty RAD web platform to provide the view/edit layer for XML data (and under that, the database layer.) Others have pointed out that your Lazlo app can speak directly to java applications as well. Its an extremely thin platform to provide a really rich user experience on, with minimal re-inventing-the-wheel overhead.
... if I didn't have tools to make my job easier, and had to do everything in vi just to prove I could, I'd go crazy. I think programmers who are so self-contented with being able to do things the 'hard-core' way just because they can are seriously missing the point. I can do everything you can do, but the more important question is why would I want to? Sure, I still use vi from time to time, but only when it makes sense to do so. I'm open to anything from vi to Visual Studio, as long as it saves me time and makes it easier for me to make my knowledge more valuable to people around me.
> The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.
What do you want, a gold star? Why is this site full of programmers who discount new tools to add to the toolbox out of hand? Lazlo is pretty neat. I was a distributed web application programmer for a long time (FreeBSD, CORBA), now I write games for consoles like the PS2
"Old man yells at systemd"
Laszlo Systems' OpenLaszlo Platform Ushers in a "Digital Life" Application Suite .NET
Laszlo and Dojo Announce Strategic AJAX Partnership
Laszlo AJAX Platform To Support Flash, DHTML,
Interview with Jim Grandy of Laszlo Systems at the Real-World AJAX Seminar in San Jose
Its easy to develop in, XML based with javascript, OO, clean and featured, extensible, can talk to whatever back end data you have (java, soap, php whatever) renders meadia/feature rich great looking client apps into browsers (or stand alone) using either Flash or DHTML.
It is NOT flash or DHTML, its a language with a compilter/renderer, output is flash (and very soon DHTML).
Easiest way to produce clean great looking feature rich web applications I;ve found.
I don't know whether it's fault of my firefox browser, or fault of their webpage, but I don't have a high confidence of a software product that advertises cross-platform capability but crashes in my Linux based Firefox. Does www.openlazlo.org crash in anyone else's browser besides mine? Or perhaps I'm just an outlier.
Absolutely nuthin!
Say it again y'all.
Silly comment. Do you have any idea what there server setup is? Didn't think so. Laszlo is the development platform, not the load balancing or caching layer. Thats where you can piss and moan about Slashdottings.
Now does every site need to worry about the drooling Slashdot hords when 99.999 percent of all their other traffic is handled perfectly by their existing setup? Nope.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Check out Flex 2. It's similar to OpenLaszlo; free as in beer and the source code is provided. However, applications built with Flex 2 run much faster than OpenLaszlo applications, there are a ton more features, and the programming model is better.
It's not "Object Orientated". It's "Object Orientificamated"
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I'm all for it, whatever it does. As long as I can watch.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"Making an arm of swiss cheese?"
I remember a similar front page article on Slashdot a year ago. If you gotta' ask what it's good for again, and if it hasn't made its way into the public yet, then Slashdot will most immediate site hits and promote interest but unless the questions is ever answered, it will fizzle again.
Laszlo is basically a javascript compiler where the render agent is either flash or dhtml. There is a cool demo taking the same source and targetting flash or dhtml but dhtml it isn't ready for primetime yet. Who should use it? Applications with long running time - I have found nearly every site leaks memory. Some of this is IE basically allowing leaks for backwards compatibility and others from just bad coding. I have found laslzo to be stable in this regard. Small applets are very easy also and present very well. In all, it is probably the best package out there. It is well rounded, looks good, and quick to develop for. I think its popularity will rise tremendously when dhtml targetting is out of beta. Cheers
Programming OpenLaszlo compared to writing raw DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX is like the difference between writing assembly language, and writing in a high level language like Python or Lisp.
It saves you a lot of time, and enables you to write and configure reusable components instead of re-inventing the wheel each time.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Sorry for the backwards metaphore. I meant OpenLaszlo is to raw DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX as Lisp/Python/etc are to Assembly Language.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Owch! I restarted apache and mysql, made a static text mirror of the drupal page, and RewriteRuled it into place at the original url: http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/124 Now maybe you can fetch the article, I hope.
Sorry about the embarassing Dru Paux.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I started learning haXe last week. It's pretty cool.
haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!
Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com
Why does everyone want to use MY computer to run THEIR code. OL might be worth a look when it is really DHTML capable, but I run NoScript to block ALL flash and most javascipt. If your site is running a Flash or JS site with no alternative access method, I'll go to your competitor.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I only just found out about Haxe... but are there any examples at all of it being used in an actual application.
Interesting concept, but until I see it proven in practice, I'm not going to spend much time on it!
I did a development job with Flex lately and was impressed, to say the least. In less than a day I had prototyped the entire interface of a rich administration UI, including tabbed panels, wizards, drag and drop between lists, etc.
Contrast this again so called AJAX; the day would have spent trying to figure out why my resizable table columns were jumping across the page in internet exploder. A comparable prototype would have taken weeks.
Once finished that work I thought seriouly about moving my own projects across to Flex but was put off by the prohibitive price (OK, I see this has changed in some way apparently...) So I investigated Lazslo, and herein is the point I want to make.
Laszlo lacks an *extremely* important aspect of Flex; declarative bindings from client side flash controls/models to remote java beans. In Flex, you can provide a thin service wrapper for whatever API you want to work against and declaratively tie client apps to it in minutes. Flash looks after the (asynchronous) serialization of deeply nested java obj graphs to actionscript and vice versa; in my experience this worked flawlessly. Lazslo on the other hand required the client to invoke something akin to a servlet that would generate a bunch of XML; this could be parsed by the client runtime and various controls populated.
Seems to me this is quite a major shortfalling compared to Flex which can for instance bidirectionally bind list controls to the return value of your service method public List getXXXXX. IMHO it puts the products in two different leagues. And mind you this was Flex 1.5 so probably the technology is better again. Apologies for sounding like a salesman..but I felt here at last was a web UI technology usable without selling one's soul...
"OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for developing user friendly web based applications, which work identically across all popular browsers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc)."
I liked it better when it was called Java.
How many times do we need to reinvent the wheel, people?
...and it worked for us.
Our web based diagram editor:
http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/
Chris Kohlhardt
Co-founder, Gliffy Inc.
... that is, help you get around being bored by the now-slashdotted, currently unreadable website pushing the story mentioned in the parent post.
In fine off-topic form, with absolutely no relevance to the site mentioned above (which none of us can read anyway):
http://www.wheresmyho.com/
It's a website to find hookers. Like, as a web service or something. Looks like a joke site to me, albeit a different kind of joke (and imho, a funnier one) than the server that's powering the story at http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/124
Yep, this is exactly the kind of tool that Microsoft and other Big Software wants to have and see widely used. The more that people begin seeing software as deliverable "content" rather than the buy-it-at-Sears appliance that it is, the easier it will be for Microsoft and other Big Software companies to force us to pay for it all every month.
I tried it out for six months or so for a project and ended up abandoning it. For basic stuff it's fine, but if you want to manipulate data client-side, it's loaded with bugs including some nasty refresh issues. Combine that with zero support on the forums, and I wasn't all that impressed. It had a load of potential, perhaps it's just not ready yet.
Are most Slashdotters actually too young to know a reference to
classic rock lyrics? The guy even gave the source, Edwin Starr!
This isn't a case of "troll" or "insightful" - Try "Funny" or "Unfunny".
Hey, Laszlo also worked for us in a good way.
MaiNada Comics use Open Laszlo for the drawing and displaying of comics.
It's a new and free site, where users can draw their comic strips directly online. It's really fun and has some cool features. Other users drawing are drawn in "real time" and are ranked by everyone. Strips can be viewed by ranting, date or user. Anyone can even blog their comics with one line of code (an iFrame link). This is an important resource to artists wanting to publish their work online without the knowledge to create a website. And it's a good initiative for comic art.
Chek it out and see what Lazslo can be used for!
( MaiNada Comics - Laszlo Drawing tool )
Tiago Cardoso
Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
Can't help but remember the song and the superb chemistry between tucker and chan in rush hour!
I know I'm biased but this really doesn't address the key problems with "Internet Application" development.
Flash is just not a suitable host scalable, OS integratable, independent applications. DHTML is just not powerful enough, no matter how fancily you use it. AJAX is just yet another overly complex web-hack, just dressed a bit better than before.
The only real solutions for me are XUL and Vexi. XUL is limited to Firefox/Mozilla users. You'll be hearing more about Vexi before the year is up.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
Nicolas Cannasse ( http://ncannasse.free.fr/ ) from http://www.motiontwin.com/ created both haxe and neko. NekoVM is a virtual machine, neko a language, nekoML a meta-lang and mod_neko the apache extension; all by one guy. Haxe will be used in production but only by people looking to build flash, ajax or dhtml based sites (ie: neither myself or the OP). I am looking forward to using neko/mod_neko for a project as soon as the JIT is done.
Well, it appears to be flash based, and while it sort of works, when I tried the laszlomail demo, none of the 'form' fields had labels, eg, I had no idea what to enter in each one. (FireFox, WITH the latest flash plugin, on FC5)
If it was truly portable, it wouldnt depend on flash. And to be honest, flash is a horrific thing for anything interactive. Its great for cartoons and entertainment, but nothing that you actually need to use for anything serious.
The latest version (Flex 2.0 Beta 3), available at http://labs.adobe.com/, is freely available to everyone (Although you will need to pay for the development IDE from macromedia if you want it).
I don't know about everyone else, but I'd rather go with a free framework from the people that created flash, rather than a framework from people that just use flash.
http://launcher.vexi.org/?core=0.92-test27&vexi=ht tp://download.vexi.org/widgets-0.92.vexi&vexi=http ://download.vexi.org/demo-1.0pre2.vexi
/.
--------------
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET
Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused
-------------
That kinda sucks. No other demo apps available.
I want to see the power of Vexi, can you show me the way?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
No, it isn't. It's an open source platform for developing user friendly Flash applications.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I think you're missing the point that OpenLaszlo is not about Flash, it's about Rich Internet Applications on any suitable platform. Flash is the most mature, widely deployed platform so currently LZX applications are targeted for SWF. Later this year, LZX will allow you to compile to DHTML applications.
Why is this a good thing? Well, if I'm a Linux user and I don't have a Flash 8 plugin for my browser, suddenly I can use your application.
Something Witty Goes Here
"Why is this site full of programmers who discount new tools to add to the toolbox out of hand?"
Because they aren't actually programmers. They're kids, hobbyists, and students who want people to see how smart they are, have never written commercial code, and ignore or are unaware of such all-important factors as maintainability and time to market. There's a reason no one pays money for someone to sit there and write PS2 code in vi (as you pointed out), but they can't quite grasp what that reason is.
monkey business to me
I'm all for new technology, but I just tried to implement an application using this in the last 4 weeks (instead of Macromedia's Flex) and with 60 or more fields, the performance just in clearing the form was upwards of 30 seconds or more. This technology has potential, but might be a ways off from truly useful enterprise apps.
Cooqy is an OpenLaszlo eBay interface, which make efficient use of bandwidth, so you can use eBay over a 56k modem. They report that it reduces network traffic by 50x, and it's 2x to 10x faster to use than the html based eBay interface:h tm
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/3/prweb356237.
It's got a lot of other nice features like mapping, a photo magnifier, tagging, and an advanced search interface, with a trippy lava-lite-esque color selection interface (in case you want to search for purple lava lites).
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Here is the definition of "Vendor lock-in" from wikipedia:
Now, please explain how FLEX is not a classic textbook case of vendor lock-in. Do you have a substantially different definition of it than wikipedia? If so, please share your definition, and tell us what you think it would take to qualify as vendor lock-in, why you think FLEX doesn't qualify, and name a better example that does qualify. Your first post in this thread claimed that it was not, but offered absolutely no support for that statement. Here's what you said:
The sentence you wrote following your denial does not support your false denial of the obvious fact that FLEX certainly does lock you into Flash.
If you can tell me which other platforms FLEX supports besides Flash, then that will support your argument, but as far as I have ever heard, FLEX is Flash-only. But I'd love to be surprized by something you know that Adobe hasn't announced, so please enlighten me!
You can also call me a troll if you like, but if you can't answer this simple question, then you're the troll, and you're just running away from an argument you know you can't win.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Pros:
...but it is pretty :)
Its pretty and looks cool.
Cons:
1. Its slow.
2. The cummunity support sometimes just plain sucks. It can take several weeks before you get a responce from dev members.
3. Does not play nice with all common platforms or java versions. Sometimes it works flawless others depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing that day.
4. Sometimes you can't even get the server to run for no apparent reason. Same machine same java, day before.
5. Takes too much time and effort to get it running. Almost alway, always it never works like they say it is suppose to, always some hitch.
My company took a look at OpenLaszlo, and the developers thought it was going to be the answer to our website make-over, but we found that Laszlo is not quite 'there' yet. Some of the controls are very slow; too slow for serious work. Regretfully, we have decided that we need something a little more mature. We're currently looking at Backbase.
Adobe used to say that SGV was here to stay, so why did they let it wither on the vine and die? (My theory is because they bought Flash, so now they don't care about SVG any more.) Why should we trust what they say about Flash, if they lied about supporting SVG?
The Adobe SVG Page they say that "Adobe has taken a leadership role in the development of the SVG specification and continues to ensure that its authoring tools are SVG compatible." Is that still true? Will FLEX ever support more than importing a trivial static subset of SVG at compile time, and will it ever run on the SVG player? Why doesn't Adobe continue developing the SVG player, if it's not yet capable of supporting the requirements of FLEX? If Adobe is dumping SVG, then why don't they put the source code for their excellent SVG implementation out there as Free Open Source Software? Are they afraid it will compete with Flash?
On the same page, Adobe also says "Open standards promote choice, provide lower-cost solutions, and facilitate interoperability." That I agree with! So now that Adobe's given up on SVG and moved on to Flash, will Adobe ever submit the Flash specification to an open standards organization so it can be openly standardized like SVG? Will Adobe ever publish the complete source code of the entire FLEX system and Flash as Free Open Source Software? Will Adobe at least make a statement that they won't sick their legal team on people who implement free open source Flash-compatible runtimes?
The archive from 2001 says: "Adobe's intention is that future releases of the Adobe SVG Viewer will strive to achieve support for the full W3C SVG specification." What ever happened to that plan? Does Adobe's current SVG player fully support the W3C SVG specification, 5 years later? We've heard the lip service, now where's the beef?
The archive from 2004 says: "Discover the open-source future of graphics with Scalable Vector Graphics." So what's the open-source future of graphics, now? I think that describes OpenLaszlo pretty well, because it's future-proof by not locking you into any one platform like Flash! Will Adobe be open-sourcing FLEX and Flash? How about at least making the SVG player open source, instead of quietly killing it and dumping its body like a forgotten bastard stepchild?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com