Is Laszlo a waste of time?
According to Rife founder Geert Bevin, Laszlo ain't all it's cracked up to be:
It's a shame, I really had huge expectations about Laszlo and even tried to sell it to a customer. I'm glad that project was cancelled or I would be in deep trouble.
Under normal circumstances, I'd dismiss this as FUD, but Geert sounds like he did his homework on this one.
I think the big buzz around was only a good marketing strategy. Just because they made something open, doesn't mean it's good - but everybody jumped at those nice demos.
Even the name it's funny: Open Laszlo. Laszlo is a hungarian male name. Near the name substantive, "open" sounds like a verb, not an adjective, so the expression "open Laszlo" sound like a call from a horror film :), to open with something the poor Laszlo (sorry couldn't help myself) everytime I hear it, that picture comes into my mind :), and I'm not the only one.
Posted by Jake Robwood on March 08, 2005 at 07:58 PM MST #
Posted by Agylen on March 08, 2005 at 09:22 PM MST #
Posted by Jason Barker on March 08, 2005 at 11:18 PM MST #
Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on March 09, 2005 at 12:56 AM MST #
Posted by Angsuman Chakraborty on March 09, 2005 at 01:39 AM MST #
I developed a lot of applications that required flash, and even flash games. I worked with JFlex, and I checked out Laszlo too. They are all bad, and the root of evil are not the frameworks but the technology: FLASH . I used flash just because the customers wanted so, not me, an that was mostly for general sites/users, not for the restricted public like a company intranet or a b2b platform.
I do not think flash sites/applications rock (I made a lot of them). The eye candy might appear cool when you encounter a site for the first time (and if it doesn't takes ages to load), but not as a day by day use application. After a while the eye candy is just disturbing - we had this with all the users after a few weeks of use. One of the biggest problems is that flash plug-ins must be installed, and once installed they pose a security risk since they load without distinction all the flash files a user encounter while surfing on the web. This is why on a lot of "production" computers they are not allowed.
Since to access flash, the admin needs to install the plug-ins, he can install as well a JRE, thus having JavaWebStart. With JavaWebStart and Swing, one can get a very good rich client, with all it's advantages. It's much more appropriate for applications - rich clients, not candy banners.
The development costs play another important role. To make a very pleasant and usable GUI, Swing is very good, and has low costs(AFAIK the lowest in the industry till yet). Flash on the other hand, (independent of the used framework) is expensive, hard to test, error prone, and with bad tools. Javascript is even more expensive than flash, because of the browser behaviour, but at least it doesn't require an installation. Even more, for javascript new frameworks, components seems to appear (for rich clients) : bindows, blueshoes, domapi, etc.
Posted by Jake Robwood on March 09, 2005 at 02:02 AM MST #
Posted by Javed Mandary on March 17, 2005 at 04:45 AM MST #
Posted by David Temkin on March 30, 2005 at 12:08 AM MST #
Posted by 143.115.155.55 on April 28, 2005 at 04:18 PM MDT #