I recently attended a talk by Peter Thoeny (the author of TWiki), in which he had some interesting things to say about how to introduce new technology into companies.
Roughly, he said that the first thing you have to do is reduce the pain that folks are currently feeling. Once this is done, you can start talking with them about new features, etc. This matches my perceptions, but I think it also offers an insight into the reason that Rails has attracted so much more attention than Laszlo (despite Laszlo's cool capabilities). Rails claims to remove the pain of creating DB-backed web sites. This is a common task for web programmers and the existing tools are pretty awful. So, the offer of an alternative is compelling. Laszlo, in contrast, promises to let programmers create web applications with snazzy new features. As much as folks might like to do this, they may be too busy with mundane problems to give it a chance. However, Laszlo and Rails are both being used to create Ajax-based web sites. So, the differences may be more apparent than real. If Laszlo can demonstrate that it saves developers real effort in creating these sites, I think it has a chance to win some mindshare. "Laszlo on Rails" and the "OpenLaszlo Rails plugin" are both aimed at getting Rails developers to use Laszlo as a way to do Ajax. However, these efforts don't seem to be getting much attention in the Rails community. Unfortunately, I don't have any clear answers to offer. I'd like to see more compelling demos, particularly if they combine Rails and Laszlo technology. Does anyone have anything else to suggest? -r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841 Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
