Beefing Against OpenLaszlo

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, June 25, 2007 @ 6:19 am

Elliotte Rusty Harold is a well know author on Java and XML. His take on OpenLaszlo is that it is a misuse of XML.

OpenLaszlo seems like a confusing mix of JavaScript and XML. I never got clear on just why there was so much XML. It seemed like a classic case of misusing XML because it’s there. I suspect JavaScript alone wasn’t strongly typed enough, and the developers didn’t want to bother writing a parser for a custom format. GWT, by contrast, is pure Java so it’s a lot cleaner. I like XML; I like Java; and if I’ve taken enough drugs, sometimes I even like JavaScript. However mixing them together in the same program just seems like a really bad idea. It’s like constantly switching from English to Chinese and back again in the same sentences.

I've got to agree that the mixing of XML and Java/Javascript seems like a bad idea. As I observed in Cognitive Load and the Superiority of Server-Side Ajax GUI Frameworks:

But why do we get a headache? Back in the 1950's, a professor of Psychology named George Miller observed that the average human being could retain seven items in short term memory, plus or minus two items. When we work with ideas or concept in any sort of analytical thinking, we run up against this limitation again and again.

John Sweller, a professor of Education, came up with the idea of cognitive load in the late 1980's. The basic idea was that your ability to learn and problem solve was limited by your short term memory. If a particular learning task required keeping track of many concept at the same time, it is said to have a high cognitive load and as a result you don't learn as well or as easily. In fact, in analytical tasks like doing complex arithmetic, it can increase the rate at which you make errors. There's a whole body of literature on cognitive load, cognitive stress, etc. Applied to our example of web application development, we see that juggling all of those different concepts in different programming and markup languages and runtime environments in our head, creates a high cognitive load, increases our error rate and impedes our ability to problem solve.

The same criticism could  be made of ZK, with it's ZUML that mixes XML and Java (or other languages). I'm still OK with using XML to wire up components, such as Spring and SwiXML, as these are minimal and have a configuration purpose.

Technorati Tags: ajax, openlaszlo, gwt, xml

Related posts:

1. Cognitive Load and the Superiority of Server-Side Ajax GUI Frameworks
2. RoR and OpenLaszlo Together
3. OpenLaszlo Considered Harmful
4. OpenLaszlo Developments Afoot
5. Monster.com’s Job Search Beta Runs on OpenLaszlo

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1. 

   Hi, Found a cool news widget for our blogs at http://www.widgetmate.com. Now I can show the latest news on my blog. Worked like a breeze.

   Comment by Mark Vane, Tuesday, June 26, 2007 @ 6:53 am

2. 

   (via dzone.com) I had similar feelings about Laszlo, although my gripes were more towards use of the old HTML 4.1 style tags, where it would have been so much more powerful with CSS-like support in the back end. Pretty up front, yes, but a big ol’ mess in the back.

   Comment by Davo, Tuesday, June 26, 2007 @ 8:07 am

3. 

   Agreed!

   Comment by Paul Lester, Wednesday, March 26, 2008 @ 11:15 pm

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