Laszlo
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Catching up on my blog reading, I noticed the post from Michael about using the Laszlo flash framework. I looked at Laszlo a while back when they first open sourced it. While it seemed interesting, I personally have some concerns about an application nobody wanted to buy. Perhaps it was because nobody wanted to use it and if that's the case making it free doesn't necessarily fix that. Using something like that is a bit too much risk for me in terms of creating a nearly full flash interface, but I'll be interested to see how it turns out for Michael.
Discussion
Hi Ian,
I was hoping you'd give me some feedback on my decision and annoucement! (Readers note: Ian was one of the people who inspired me to start blogging about my yet-to-be-released product.)
There are two items you mentioned that I would like to comment on.
1) I don't work for Laszlo Systems, but like you, I have a feeling the Laszlo Presentation Server was open-sourced because not enough people were buying it. And the fact that Macromedia released Flex was probably the nail in the Laszlo-for-profit coffin.
But the fact that it wasn't a commercial success doesn't mean it's not an incredibly useful technology for me, the programmer.
2) "...too much risk for me in terms of creating a nearly full flash interface, ..."
I felt that not using a technology combination like OpenLaszlo (as it's now known) and the Flash player would be a bigger risk for me.
When I started this project I surveyed the competition. And you know what I found? A group of applications that excel at being not very intuitive. I tried a bunch of their demo's and each one was difficult to use. One of my initial thoughts on differentiating my application from all others would be the ease of use.
For me to build the kind of application I want to, I need a technology that will provide the richness of a desktop app, but the deployment model of the web. (Due to time constraints I won't be able to fully realize all of my GUI ideas. But I will be able to implement certain aspects of them.) And the combination of the Flash player and OpenLaszlo will allow me to do that.
Not taking advantage of that technology would be a bigger risk, for me.
Why not JavaScript/Ajax? Well, I blogged about that already. For those that don't want to link over: It's too hard!
OpenLaszlo (as it's now known) provides me with a lot of elements I can use to create a more useable GUI and a better experience for my customers.
Are OpenLaszlo and Flash 2 perfect technologies?
Of course not. As I mentioned in my blog, OpenLaszlo has it's issues - it's far from perfect. But I'm betting the good will outweigh the bad.
Take care buddy,
-michael.
Created by Michael Sica on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
John, as a PHP developer looking at using Laszlo for my current project, I would looove it if the laszlo docs took the user comments model from the PHP docs. I can't tell you the number of times the tidbit or implementation sample that I was looking for, both while learning and later as a seasoned devleoper of PHP, was in the user comments section of a page of the PHP docs.
I'm loving Laszlo so far, and am very excited about using it in my current and future projects, great work!
Created by Andrew Cordery on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Hi John,
I wish I was keeping a list of the errors in the Developer's Guide while I was reading it. If you had a list of the issues you could probably clean them up in a couple of hours.
That's great news about the books! Any news on their expected timeframe?
I had to check the PHP documentation to see what you were talking about. If you're referring to the "add note" feature, I like it very much! I've seen it used on Macromedia's CF "livedocs", as well as MySQL's documentation. The best part about that style of documentation is that they will more than likely alert you to a bug in the class/function/method. So you don't spend hours trying to figure out what's wrong with your code, when it's the actual library with the bug.
Created by Michael Sica on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Thanks for the feedback.
As to the Developer's Guide being "riddled with" errors: I have no doubt that you're right. However, a little more specificity would be helpful.
I do intend to clean up the minor annoyances as best I can, but there are whole areas that need my attention first -- such as the new charting and graphing components, the profiler, and new debugging functionality. While I am quite proud of the documentation as it is, my "to do" list seems virtually endless. And that's just base functionality I'm talking about, not any "best practices" kind of stuff like you're asking for.
I agree entirely that there is a need for a guide to (architecting, building, testing, deploying) large applications. I am aware of one book under development that will address this topic, and I have heard rumors of at least two other books. There are no plans for me to write such a book, however, even though I think it would be great fun to do so. Simply keeping up and incrementally improving the existing docs is enough work for one person.
For now I'm going to maintain focus on Laszlo in the small, but if the hoped-for books do not appear soon I'm sure that we'll revisit our strategy.
Within OpenLaszlo we're also discussing ways to open up the documentation process to the community at large, so that I cease to be the bottleneck. Many people have commented favorably on the PHP model of user comments attached to the documentation. Do you you have an opinion on that?
Created by John Sundman on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Hi John,
I've just started blogging about developing my application in OpenLaszlo. (Click on my name to go to my blog.)
Here are a couple of areas OpenLaszlo can improve on in the documentation department:
- The "Software Engineer's Guide to Developing Laszlo Applications" is riddled with spelling and grammar errors.
- We need a guide to constructing a larger application. How should I go about creating a common layout for my application, and having the content change in a central "content" area? What's the best way to build a controller in OpenLaszlo?
- The javadoc-style documentation for all the classes and methods available in OpenLaszlo is a good start. But I'd like to see more in-depth descriptions and examples of how to use those classes (in the class docs).
I think the single best thing you can do for the OpenLaszlo community would be to write 2 books. "How to Program in OpenLaszlo" and "How to Build an Application in OpenLaszlo". (Well, that and make the grid and tabpane components better. 
)
Created by Michael Sica on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Hey, big props for keeping an eye out for Laszlo discussions and adding your 2 cents. I love that.
I'm not saying you didn't have any customers, but it seems apparent that if there were sufficient customers then Laszlo wouldn't have been open sourced. That said, I agree that it's a great opportunity and if a community can gel around it that will be a great thing for both the web and Laszlo Systems.
It's encouraging that they have someone on board who's responsible for tutorials and documentation, that's always one of the biggest problems with OS software. If the community can't figure out how to use it then nobody will.
Created by Ian on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
An interesting discussion (for us Laszlo partisans).
For a little tutorial on how to use OpenLaszlo to create swfs that can be deployed without the server, see here:
http://openlaszlo.org/tips/2005/solo/
http://openlaszlo.org/tips/2005/solo-2/
You'll find little Laszlo apps embedded in the blog.
You don't need to have the OpenLaszlo server running to deploy these things. They're just embedded swfs, and they can do anything that a server-deployed app can do except SOAP and XML rpc. (If you need those things in your app you'll need to deploy them with the OpenLaszlo server, which is used to proxy SOPAn and XML-rpc.)
I hope that this won't sound too defensive, but when you say that you're wary of an "application" that nobody wanted to buy -- well, OpenLaszlo is really more of a platform than an application. Laszlo Systems, the company, sells applications like Laszlo Mail, of which Earthlink is the most prominent customer. Earthlink very much wanted to buy that app, and paid real money for it. Laszlo Systems has lots of paying customers who pay real money for applications (disclaimer: I work for Laszlo Systems. Further disclaimer: I wrote the tutorials linked to above.)
The long term success of OpenLaszlo will probably be determined by two things:
-- the emergence of a devoted user community
-- the financial success of Laszlo Systems, inc.
At some point, of course, if the community takes off & and OpenLaszlo ecology evolves, OpenLaszlo will become able to succeed irrespective of Laszlo Systems. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer.
I'll look forward to continued discussion of Laszlo's strong and weak spots. I'll be especially concerned about the learnability of the platform -- as the OpenLaszlo "doc guy" I'm responsible for making sure that you can find the info you need to succeed as developers.
Created by John Sundman on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Heh, leary.
Ah that was something I was wondering, if you needed the entire framework to run everything. Interesting.
Created by Ian on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
"I hope I didn’t come off too negative about your decision"
Let's just call it, "seemingly suprised and and a little leary." 
The great thing about OpenLaszlo is that you can compile little bits of code into .swf files that can be deployed without the OpenLaszlo server. So you can make a small bit of functionality in OpenLaszlo that communicates with your PHP backend through REST web services - i.e. hit a URL, get back simple XML (no SOAP). So you could build 1 little part of your app with OpenLaszlo and deploy nothing but the .swf file, the flash movie.
I plan on blogging about all the BAD parts of OpenLaszlo. As I run into more bad issues I'll post 'em!
Created by Michael Sica on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
Thanks for the added details. I hope I didn't come off too negative about your decision, I didn't have time for a long post at that moment so just did one off the cuff.
I figured it was to get more of the desktop experience. As you move forward I'll be very interested to hear about how the integration goes and your experiences with it. There are some places I would like to add flash in HelpSpot so I'll be all ears for your updates.
Created by Ian on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm
If you note any documentation errors henceforward, I would be obliged if you would bring them to the attention of openlaszlo. The best way to do that is to file a bug (in JIRA, on the OpenLaszlo site). Or, you can post it to the "Doc Feedback" section of the forums.
Indeed I was referring to the "add note" feature. We're looking into that-- or, it's on our wish-list/radar. We would like to do that or something similar but have not yet investigated how to integrate that kind of functionality with our current tools. So please don't take that as a promise, only as a statement of interest.
The neatest thing about our current docs, in my opinion, is the live, editable examples. Since the docs contain hundreds of live examples, they need to be compiled -- this is currently done with a pretty arcane script which, among other things, uses XSLT to transform the source HTML files into the output files that contain the live apps. I'm trying to figure out the implications of this for adding notes to the result, but my mind quickly boggles. I'll need to do much more serious poking. . .
As to the book(s) under development, I'm aware that one long-time Laszlo developer -- 5 years hardcore Laszlo experience --has a contract is working on a book with a co-author in their "spare" time. I don't know what their deadlines are, but I will say that he looks tired! I also know that Laszlo has been contacted by several publishers who have at least investigated doing books, but I do not know how many of these investigations have turned into actual projects.
I certainly hope that within a few months the Laszlo bookshelf will be much more populated. I'll post updates if I hear anything more.
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Created by John Sundman on 07.28.2005 3:07 pm