Macromedia has Flex. Flex is a set of tools and technologies to allow developers to easily build rich internet applications – without the need to learn the Flash authoring environment. Using an XML file to control the user interface, and with interweaved / external Actionscript code, developers can create compelling applications online.
Flex is great as a product and Macromedia is working on to make it better, and probably more cost effective 🙂 But I am not talking about Flex here…
It’s about OpenLaszlo.
Laszlo Systems created Laszlo a while ago and open sourced it as OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo is very similar to Flex – XML based language to create RIA, deployed on the web. A good lineup of companies is already using Laszlo – Earthlink, Yahoo, La Quinta etc.
Laszlo has been around for long. They started out with developing smaller things and the project has grown well over the years. The open source version is generating good interest – especially because of the “free of cost” tag, as compared to the hefty price of Flex. I have not dabbled into OpenLaszlo so far, but it’s time to jump in.
We are developing Glancer using OpenLaszlo. And I will post things as I learn them!
I was interested in your use of Laszlo as it is something I am looking at using for a RIA app to a replace an existing text messaging written in VB.
Is Laszlo as good as you hoped? And would you know of people who can help me with some apps?
Regards
William
Hi William,
Laszlo is quite good. Our experience so far has been a mixed bag. The primary grudge I have is for the LaszloIDE – it’s not good enough. But the language itself and the engine are very good. I strongly believe it has a lot of potential. I will post some more in about a month after reviewing FlexBuilder too and by that time we would have gained a lot more expertize in Laszlo too.
LaszloSystems provides consultancy on Laszlo! Well, even my company (Magnet) can take a Laszlo project 😉
:Nirav