Pathfinder Development » OpenLaszlo Considered Harmful

OpenLaszlo Considered Harmful

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 @ 7:00 am

Yesterday was the good, tomorrow will be the good again, and in general I will have more good things to say about OpenLaszlo than bad, but today I have some bad things to say nonetheless, from my conversations with some Flash developers. I've picked an appropriately inflamatory title to go with it, but before you leave flame comments, understand the origins of the title (see below).

I picked the brains of a number of full time Flash developers of my acquaintance, so -- from my notes -- they had the following things to say about OpenLaszlo:

When Flex was $20K per processor, there was a cost justification.
Now that Flex is free, there is much less reason - and if you can use Eclipse, you don't need to buy flexbuilder.
If folks already know actionscript, they don't need to learn a new scripting language.
In their experience, development in Flex is twice as fast as in Lazlo - built by a more robust, experienced software firm.
Also moving data around in Lazlo - some issues, and internationalization is squirly at best.
Likely always a version behind in flash support. If you were investing over five years, you should be wary, because Adobe owns flash, no standards board, etc., so they can do whatever they want with it.
They all had horror stories of coming in on troubled projects where OpenLaszlo was used and they had a great deal of difficulty saving the application.

That last point has me a little worried. I didn't get a consistent answer as to why these projects were troubled or which version of OpenLaszlo was used. It could be they were all just Flex biggots and didn't like how OpenLaszlo worked. It could also be that the professionalism of OpenLaszlo developers was not that high back then.

Does anyone else have project experience with OpenLaszlo that they would like to share?

---

Back in March of 1968, the great Computer Scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra published his now classic essay "Go To Statement Considered Harmful." His well thought out argument, on why the Go To Statement made it hard to undestand and support programs, has made it to the top of the list of best practices in software development -- don't use gotos. His contentious title caught the interest of computer scientists and made them read it in the first place. So take the title as the tongue in cheek, discusion inspiring reference it is meant to be.

Technorati : ajax, flash, openlaszlo

Topics: Flash

agile ajax

Comments: 12 so far

Hey Dietrich,

If you’d like to talk to some *OpenLaszlo* developers, drop me a line and I’d be glad to get you in touch. Flash development is really a very different beast than OpenLaszlo development, and in my experience not too many people are fully informed with both, so you might want to collect some OpenLaszlo data points so your comments are more interpolation than extrapolation.

One factual correction:

+ OpenLaszlo’s scripting language is ECMAScript Edition 3, aka JavaScript 1.5, aka JScript 5.6. It’s correct that there are (minor) differences between ActionScript and OpenLaszlo’s scripting language, but in my opinion ActionScript is the outlier — you can port DHTML/Ajax code libraries to OpenLaszlo much more easily than to Flash.

And some responses:

It’s arguably a good thing that OL is a version behind Flash. First of all, high market penetration of new Flash players is not immediate, and we try to have OL releases available before penetration tops 80%, which is where most Internet (not intranet/kiosk) project cycles are initiated.

And second, OpenLaszlo is compatible with Flash 6, 7, 8, and (in emulation) 9. Flex 2 is only compatible with Flash 9 native. If you want to develop in Flex against the 95% penetration player, Flash8, you have to use Flex 1; Flex 2 only works in Flash 9 native. So developers with previous investment in Flex 1 apps need costly retooling to run in Flash 9 native, whereas OpenLaszlo’s cross-runtime architecture means you will be able to run the same app across multiple current *and future* runtimes as they are supported. As a datapoint, we brought our Calendar demo, a 3700 line app, into DHTML by changing fewer than 1% of the code.

In fact, the “Flash is proprietary” argument is one of the big reasons OpenLaszlo is expanding to include DHTML and JME runtimes. Would you want to deploy a multi-million dollar app against Flex 2 when Adobe’s strategic interests for the Flash platform may not be in alignment with your own over the long term? With OpenLaszlo, not only are we not aligned with Adobe, we’re not captive to Adobe either — and since the project is open source, you don’t have to be in alignment with us either.

Furthermore, if you’ve seen our Calendar demo running in DHTML in FireFox 1.5, you’ll know that there’s no Flash monopoly on clean, animation-rich user interfaces — DHTML is as capable a Flash in that regard. So the “Flash advantage” may not be so much after all. (I should say we are enthusiastic about being hosted on Flash 9 native — it appears to be significantly faster then Flash 8 or 9 in emulation mode.)

And finally, with regard to your unsubstantiated claims of “failed projects”, all I’ll say is that there’s a word for this rhetorical technique in usenet: it’s called being a “troll”. I almost didn’t reply to this posting because I didn’t want to give you more traffic, but we’re a small company and don’t have the PR reach of Adobe so we have to be clear about our advantages whenever we can.

Comment by Jim Grandy, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 @ 4:38 pm
I only had good experiences with OpenLaszlo: for two years in a row by now. Awesome technology, incredible team, it’s really fun!

Some more feedback: http://ansiguy.blogspot.com/2006/09/openlaszlo-better-than-ajax-and-flex.html
and in my blog.
http://www.openlaszlonaut.de/2006/10/18/openlaszlo-doesnt-harm-my-long-time-strategy-but-adobe-and-flex-do/

Comment by raju, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 @ 7:01 pm
I think the problem with your post is that you only talked to Flash developers…

I don’t think OpenLaszlo really targets flash developers. I think it’s meant to target java developers interested in having a richer UI experience for their apps.

Comment by Brian Lee, Wednesday, October 18, 2006 @ 3:41 am
Right, Brian. Think about the scenario: having cinema-like animation (Laszlo calls that Cinematic User Experience). Smooothly changing interfaces from one state to the next. A perfect example is Behr ColorSmart. A product selection tool implementing the Cinematic User Experience.

http://www.behr.com/behrx/workbook/index.jsp

It’s pretty hard to do such an application if you don’t have some good developers on the team. And those guys normally hate the Flash authoring tool with the timeline. But, Diethard, I think by saying “Flash developers” you probably meant Flex developers.

Comment by raju, Wednesday, October 18, 2006 @ 4:49 am
I liked moving to Laszlo from Java applets (the last technology “considered harmful”). Since I only rarely had access to Flash, I never learned much ActionScript, but I do know Javascript, the main thing you program Laszlo apps in.

My eclipse “Run as Laszlo Application” stopped working, and I noticed that the Eclipse Laszlo plug-in seems to have ceased development and maintenance. It definitely is worrisome IF Eclipse has ongoing flex support but not for openlaszlo, since that might indicate a herd trend.

I don’t really relish getting into ActionScript - Laszlo flashes and DOM-based flash seems more fitting to things that already have javascript.

I now use python and php, or sometimes perl, to generate hard-coded Javascript to plug in to laszlo projects, as well as generating xml files and so on. I debug and locate everything (resources, scripts) in Eclipse still (I have been told that either manipulating my paths extensively or downgrading my Java will make the run as laszlo application work again, who knows?), simply using browser reload instead of run application.

The only things I have used Flash for is to fix Open Adstream ads, actually. I also used other free flash developers, but have not gotten into Flex, so I think I am an OpenLaszlo developer.

Is Flex better? Does ActionScript work better than JavaScript? I like JavaScript a lot, actually, as long as it’s not misused to produce black box pages, and as long as it’s standards-compliant. I like how OL lets you produce pagelets that integrate into a page well and which have the same DOM, roughly, as a browser, and yet one that crosses browser lines without having to do functional detection or redundancy.

Comment by Marion_Delgado, Monday, March 5, 2007 @ 11:39 am
if only openLaszlo would not use this DOJO beast for DHTML runtime , than I think it would be lot more appealing, DOJO is obviously a bloated framework, well known for its poor performance, and I am very surprised when openLaslzo picked it as dhtml runtime core.

Comment by levan, Friday, June 1, 2007 @ 2:38 pm
P.S “DOJO considered harmful”

Comment by levan, Friday, June 1, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
Hi,

First I found openlaszlo a fun and approachable environment and have been using it since it’s first releases. I don’t do much actionscript or javascript but openlaszlo’s xml syntax makes exploring those other core languages a lot easier. When I heard flex was to be free I began looking at the code and example applications and felt immediately not at home with this other syntax for coding, perhaps it’s what they code flex code, found it cryptic and another learning curve I would to go through, an investment I wasn’t sure would pay. From the start laszlo is not intimidating is very organic in it’s nature as you code small applications into larger more complex systems. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents…it’s fun and I’m only limited by my imagination not encumbered by some rigid coding scheme. I need to spend more time with Flex to know where the flex is in that product. But that would take time away from laszlo :o))

Comment by Rick Lam, Sunday, December 2, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
estou ajuntando um pessoal ai para compartilhar arquivos e resolvi criar um

“http://groups.google.com/group/openlaszo“

Para ajuntar um material e dicussões e compartilhar conhecimento, para melhor desenvolvermos. Espero o Apoio de vc quem for la para participar do grupo é so me enviar um e-mail ton_boy66@hotmail.com

Tanto que ja disponibilizei um material em “português” é claro

Obrigado Pela Atenção de Todos

Comment by ton_boy66, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
estou ajuntando um pessoal ai para compartilhar arquivos e resolvi criar um

“http://groups.google.com/group/openlaszo“

Para ajuntar um material e dicussões e compartilhar conhecimento, para melhor desenvolvermos. Espero o Apoio de vc quem for la para participar do grupo é so me enviar um e-mail ton_boy66@hotmail.com

Tanto que ja disponibilizei um material em “português” é claro

Obrigado Pela Atenção de Todos

Comment by ton_boy66, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
I have been developing a complex application in OpenLaslo for the past year. Prior to this we tried other platforms, PHP, Flash, AJAX, none of these could do what we wanted to, namely make a web application that behaved like a regular non-web application.

Now, maybe it could be done with Flash but as a developer who has had experience with programming languages (object-oriented, procedural, scripting) I found the way Flash programming worked to be very disorienting since it was geared towards events and frames occurring on a time-line rather than objects interacting of procedures being called. Maybe flash is intuitive for a person who does animations and films but being a programmer with none of that type of experience I was not one of those people.

OpenLaszlo like any language has its advantages and disadvantages. It seems to be good ad doing everything that standard web languages (HTML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc.) are not good at doing. However, it takes some getting used to, many of the things taken care of automatically by HTML have to be specifically programmed in OpenLaszlo. The language is a little counter-intuitive sometimes at first but once you have spent a couple of weeks developing with it you start to learn how to go about doing things in it and then it becomes a powerful way to do many of the things in a web application that you’ve always wanted to do but had never been able to do. The OpenLaszlo syntax is far simpler than programming Java GUIs or Flash applications in my opinion.

The OpenLaszlo development forums are also filled with helpful people who are always willing to help you figure out how to do something if you get stuck.

I’ve never tried Flex since it was not Free at the time I started my OpenLaszlo project so I can’t compare the two.

Comment by Kevin, Friday, December 14, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
Fuck OpenLaszlo. And fuck your shitty site for requiring JavaScript. Asshole. Just fucking deleted my whole comment. You are all fucking idiots. There, that about sums up what you would have thought of my lost comment. Dickweed.

Comment by J. Adam Moore, Saturday, September 6, 2008 @ 11:32 pm