Experiences with OpenLaszlo?

Question

In a related question, I asked about Web Development. I came across something called OpenLaszlo yesterday and thought it looked interesting for doing some website development. The site has a bunch of good information on it and they've got some nice tutorials and such, but being a total novice (as far as web development goes), I'm wondering whether anyone here would recommend this. As I stated in my other question, this is a new world for me and there are a lot of directions I could go. Can you compare/contrast this and other web development you've done? Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, but I haven't heard much about it on SO and I'm hoping to get some opinions on this.

Answer 1

I used openLaszlo to develop a few blog widgets for some friends of mine (about a year ago) and it was easy enough to get something basic working and it looked OK. But if I had to do it again, I would probably use FLEX I think you can make a more polished looking application in a lot less time using Flex than with Laszlo

Answer 2

One benefit of OpenLaszlo is the possibility of DHTML output. But for me the mix of XML and JavaScript in the same source file was somewhat confusing.

Answer 3

I worked on a website for about a year in which the entire UI was developed in Laszlo. I've also developed AJAX applications using JS frameworks such as JQuery, Prototype and Scriptaculous.

In my experience, the total effort required is considerably less when using Laszlo, and the class-based object model helps to keep your code better organised than when using JS frameworks. My only complaints about Laszlo were that:

• It "breaks the browser" in terms of support for the back/forward/refresh buttons. This problem also exists with AJAX, but most JS libraries seem to have found a workaround.
• No support for internationalization, though none of the JS libraries are any better in my experience
• Relatively small user base/community compared to competitors such as GWT, JQuery, etc.

All in all, I thought OpenLaszlo was a pretty good solution for creating rich web-based user interfaces, and has a number of very novel features, e.g. ability to deploy on multiple runtimes (Flash, DHTML, etc.) without requiring any code changes.

Also, I should mention that I haven't used it for almost a year, so it's likely that some progress has been made in recent times on the issues I mentioned above.

Answer 4

You definitely can write a flash app quickly with OpenLaszlo. There are a lot of similarities to developing for Silverlight.

One OpenLaszlo lameness is that it uses a lame variation of javascript similar to ActionScript. Takes a little getting used to, if you are used to the latest features.

Also, the final flash file that you end up with is very large (file size) compared to what you can do with other tools.