Laszlo Systems recently released their flash-based rich client platform to the open source community. David Temkin, the CTO of Laszlo Systems has been interviewed in which he answers questions on where Laszlo fits in, how it changes web development, why open source?, and competition.

Read the article: http://news.com.com/David+vs.+Goliath+vs.+Goliath/2008-7344_3-5457982.html

Visit the Laszlo website: http://www.laszlosystems.com/

Eclipse plugin for Laszlo on IBM Alphaworks :

http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ide4laszlo

Can't wait to try this one out. It's about time!

Eclipse plugin for Laszlo on IBM Alphaworks :http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ide4laszlo

Yup. If you're lucky to live in US or Canada

Eclipse plugin for Laszlo on IBM Alphaworks :http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ide4laszlo

Yup. If you're lucky to live in US or Canada

Not exactly true. If you live outside US and Canada you won't be allowed to download the plugin immediately but after having registered with the IBM site, your download request will be reviewed and depending on the country you live in, after a few days you will be contacted by e-mail with the instructions about how to download what you have requested.

If you live outside US and Canada you won't be allowed to download the plugin immediately but after having registered with the IBM site, your download request will be reviewed and depending on the country you live in, after a few days you will be contacted by e-mail with the instructions about how to download what you have requested.

What's it got in it, WMD blueprints??

I beta tested FLEX a while back and I was really impressed with it. From a Java developers perspective, writing MXML was far easier than working with FlashMX 2004 Pro. We liked it so much that our client was also intersted to see how it might play out in the final version. We were hoping that Macromedia woudl price it like their existing server apps, around $1000. When we saw the $12k per CPU we dropped any thoughts of EVERY using FLEX. Considering that a FLEX license alone was starting to creep up to the total cost of project, no one could justify the cost. Laszlo is differnt story altogether. For one, our client has a lot of OLD Mac users in teh creative field still using Mac OS 9. With Laszlo, we can work down to the Flash 5 player,and not have to ask them to upgrade to Flash 7. Second, the fact that it is open source and plug nicely into JBoss is also a plus. Third, a pretty damn good Eclipse Plugin from IBM. And lastly, the LZX laguage is pretty damn easy to learn. It's so easy that I read this article on Friday, and got a simple app working on my train home taht night, which is about 45 minutes. This is awesome! Thanks Laszlo!

A couple of weeks ago I took a first look at Laszlo, looks promosing, especially as a Flex alternative. But what I'm missing in the documentation (and I did also post some time ago a simular question on their forum, but with no response), is some explanation on how to integrate this technology with for example Struts or Spring MVC.

I have never worked before with non-page-cenric web applications, so I guess I have to rethink some of the strategies I used in the past. Perhaps it would be useful for people simular to my experience, if someone could tell something more about the mvc integration and the non-page-centric wat of working (difference with classic mvc)?

What about performance, does it scale in a high level environment or should we stick for that with the classic java web tier stuff?

Grtz

MVC is still viable with RIA platforms like Laszlo. You could use WebServices, XML-RPC, XML, or Java calls. To date, I have only changed my Struts action classes to return XML rather than HTML. Other than that, the backend is pretty much the same.

I am now looking at the JavaRPC mechanism to execute Java methods directly.

In my experience 9not of laszlo, but similar technologies) Performance/scalability of a rich client can be as good, or better, than a traditional page-based web app.

- No re-building and resending the boilerplate from the server tothe browser every time,, you only send the data that has changed

- some of the trivial processing can be off-loaded onto the client as actionscript, javascript or whatever (think grid computing)

As always, what matters in the end is tuning the code on your own app, but certainly there's nothing inherently unperformant about a rich client architecture.