On 6/20/06, Geert Bevin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This was the first article: > http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/3/8/wasting_time_with_laszo
As someone who has been using Laszlo for about two weeks, some of your initial reactions resonate with me. In particular, you said, "Now this is already bad, but it gets worse since most of the times it never works as you intended the first time off. The combination of bugs, vaguely documented features, abstract examples and crippled features (like the stripped down version of Javascript and very basic XPath support) forces you often to try out everything three or four times before you get the behaviour you want." I wouldn't word it quite as strongly. In particular, I think that most of the documentation is quite good. Still, I would agree that my biggest gripe is also that "it never works as you intended the first time off". First, XML is an inherently unwieldy and verbose syntax. I always have to deal with a slew of syntax errors before the thing will even compile (much more so than other programming languages I have worked with). Second, parts of the API lack consistency, so I'm constantly looking things up. For example, in some parts of the API, you refer to other methods by using delegates, in other parts you simply use dot notation, and in others, you pass two arguments -- the object and then the property name as a string. Using delegates all the time would be more uniform, but because delegates need to be explicitly memory-managed, I dread using delegates. Next, Laszlo is designed so that there are at least three ways in principle to accomplish every task (in tags, in scripting, or some combination). In practice, however, only one way actually works for a given problem and it takes trial and error to figure out which way to do it. Since the tools are so limited for tracking down problems, it is a rather slow process to isolate the code which is causing problems, and try every variation to get it to work. Many times, the problem has to do with the fact that it is difficult to predict the order in which your code will be inited and executed. Finally, because the coding portion of Laszlo is based on Javascript, which I consider to be a rather "weak" language, expressing complex logic and verifying its correctness is difficult. That said, I still think Laszlo is the best option I've encountered yet for deploying snazzy-looking applications with no install over the web. The look and feel of the built-in animating user-interface components are excellent, and it is relatively easy to create your own custom UI elements with the task in mind. Event handling features and constraints simplify many typical ui challenges. --Mark _______________________________________________ Laszlo-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-user
