Just as a follow up in case others are interested, I have been looking
at OpenLaszlo a bit (heard of it a few times, never got around to
looking more closely). It does seem interesting. On first view the XML
for building up screens seems understandable with nice data binding
capabilities. For my purpose there seem to be two restrictions for my
personal need. (Warning: I am certainly no expert, so it could be
ignorance rather than fact!)
* Seems to be based around being able to fetch a complete list of
all data to display in a scroll list in a single call. Could not
see any way to only make it request enough data for the current
screen, but with the scroll bar correctly sized for all values.
(It has a "lazy" mode, but it requires all the data to be returned
via XML from the server - "lazy" only affects the number of
objects in the client created, not the volume of data
downloaded). This is important for me in terms of performance.
Its not necessarily the volume of data to be downloaded - its also
the length of time to generate the data to download. If querying
from a database for example, why fetch 1,000 (or more) rows if the
user never scrolls past the first page of 10 items. (A common
solution is to have paginated results, instead of a single big
scrollable region. A single scrollable region is just nicer in my
opinion.)
* The DHTML output looks useful, but seems incomplete. The Rich
Text Editor widget for example appears to be only available for
Flash, not DHTML in the current release. It also seemed a bit
sluggish compared to the Flash output (using IE anyway). I did
have the question that if DHTML was good enough, why bother with
Flash as an alternative. Just use JS+DHTML and cover all
platforms without a JS dependency. Then OpenLaszlo is just
another framework (albeit quite a nice one).
It does lead onto a question on how to do the server side (not specific
to OpenLaszlo). What is the best technology to do REST based XML
responses, with authentication etc all done. JSR 311 (JAX RS),
Restlets, etc are looking promising here.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. It is quite interesting. Certainly
looked much easier to get pages developed than with GWT, although you
might have less ultimate flexibility as a result. It was quite fun
using their web site to edit the sample pages and instantly see the
results. The built in UI debugger on the page was also quite cool!
Alan
Ruben Reusser wrote:
> I'd try to have a look at openlaszlo as well. Like flex, compiles to
> flash but can also render dhtml, web apps seem to run on the iPhone as
> well.
>
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