HI David I really appreciate your valuable feedback. I intend to involve Open Laszlo community for this initiative. Based on experience with 2 other open source applications developed in Open Laszlo, GeniForum and GeniTutor, I would like to involve community members earlier in development phase.
I have registered a project hosted at google code and invite everyone interested in project to contribute. http://code.google.com/p/geniconnector/ At this point, I would like community to define requirements and contribute towards development. Having developed various applications using Open Laszlo, we are not well placed to comprehend problems faced by various Open Laszlo Developers, especially developers focused on front end development. Regards, Khurram Samad GeniTeam www.geniteam.com -----Original Message----- From: David Temkin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 9:55 PM To: Khurram Samad Cc: [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Laszlo-user] Open Laszlo With Google Gears Khurram, I wanted to give you some (belated) reaction to your initial release. First, congratulations on getting it out and involving the community. That's a great first step. While you included documentation (good!), the package is missing developer-focused API documentation. End-user documentation makes less sense here, at least in my opinion. I would expect a document that would explain to an OpenLaszlo developer * What they can do with Laszlo on Gears * How they can do it -- sample code showing features, simply * Description for taking an existing OpenLaszlo application and enabling it for offline use with Laszlo on Gears * Installation docs Another thing I'd suggest you focus on as you refine these APIs is to make them very simple and very familiar to OpenLaszlo developers. OpenLaszlo data APIs are XML-centric -- unlike the SQL./Javascript data provided by Google Gears. The key is to make it so that an OL developer can take advantage of these persistence features without having to learn another framework. Max's work with the database API was designed such that an OpenLaszlo dataset could be "persistence-enabled" so that changes to the dataset will be persisted into a data store automatically -- without any idea of how the database or other persistent store works. That is the key to its value -- an OpenLaszlo developer should not need to learn a new API to get the benefit of a persistence framework. I'd like to give you a view of the "competition" here -- see below. Note the concise expression of the package's value; the developer- focused introduction, the way the value-added features are called out. You may not have enough time/resources to compete with Dojo's efforts here, but I believe this is what developers expect. How do plan to proceed with this effort? - D. > > > Dojo is proud to announce a new beta release of Dojo Offline. This > release > has a huge amount of exciting new functionality, including a full > port to > Google Gears, a port from Dojo 0.4 to 0.9, and more. > > Dojo Offline is an open-source toolkit that makes it easy to create > sophisticated, offline > web applications. It sits on top of Google Gears [http:// > gears.google.com], a > plugin from Google that helps extend web browsers with new > functionality. Dojo > Offline makes working with Google Gears easier; extends it with > important > functionality; creates a higher-level API than Google Gears > provides; and > exposes developer productivity features. In particular, Dojo > Offline provides > the following functionality: > > * An offline widget > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#widget] > that you can easily embed in your web page with just a > few lines of code, automatically providing the user with > network feedback, > sync messages, offline instructions, and more > > * A sync framework > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#sync] to > help you store actions done while offline and sync > them with a server once back on the network > > * Automatic network and application-availability detection > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#network_status] > to determine when your application is on- or off-line so that you > can take appropriate action > > * A slurp() method > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#slurp] that > automatically scans the page and figures out all the > resources that you need offline, including images, stylesheets, > scripts, > etc.; this is much easier than having to manually maintain > which resources > should be available offline, especially during development. > > * Dojo Storage > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#dojo_storage], > an easy to use hashtable abstraction for storing offline data > for when you don't need the heaviness of Google Gear's SQL > abstraction; > under the covers Dojo Storage saves its data into Google Gears > > * Dojo SQL [http://docs.google.com/View? > docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#dojo_sql], an > easy to use SQL layer that executes SQL statements and returns > them as > ordinary JavaScript objects > > * New ENCRYPT() and DECRYPT() SQL keywords > [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#crypto] > that you can mix in when using Dojo > SQL, to get transparent cryptography for columns of data. > Cryptography is > done on a Google Worker Pool thread, so that the browser UI is > responsive. > > * Integration with the rest of Dojo, such as the Dojo Event system > > To get started: See the Dojo Offline home page > [http://dojotoolkit.org/offline]; > read the new tutorial titled "Creating Offline Web Applications With > Dojo Offline" [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr]; > download [http://download.dojotoolkit.org/experimental/offline/ > offline_sdk_0.9.zip] > the new > Dojo Offline 0.9 beta SDK; > and play [http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhkhksk4_8gdp9gr#demos] > with the demos. > > Best. > Brad
