Last night I presented part 2 of a 2-part series looking at Flex and OpenLaszlo at the Tucson JUG. Here are my final thoughts on the two (given a brief introduction to each):
- Both are good platforms for RIA
- I really like the fact that you can compile Flex apps in either XML or in ActionScript
- I like OpenLaszlo’s xpath notation for connecting to XML datasources
- I feel that Flex has really gained the mind-share of the Open-Source community. I found many more tools available to me in Flex-land than in OpenLaszlo
- See BlazeDS, GraniteDS for some excellent Open-Source data and messaging providers for Flex
- Maven and Ant(included with the Flex SDK) tools for Flex
- Unfortunately the Eclipse plugin for OpenLaszlo appears to be gone, gone, gone.
- Both have Unit testing frameworks available – ASUnit, FlexUnit, and LzUnit
- I like the fact that OpenLaszlo supports additional run-times through the new “legals” initiative (DHTML and others are in the pipeline through a partnership with Sun)
- I couldn’t find an easy way to setup a project for OpenLaszlo through Ant or Maven. I’m sure they exist but nothing turned up in a cursory search
- I take it back, I finally found this on the OpenLaszlo wiki for ant tasks included with the source. But not packaged up all nice and clean like the ones for Flex. Blech.
- I also like how easy it is to create and modify components for Laszlo. I don’t know how easy it is to do this in Flex.
- The docs for OpenLaszlo are somewhat scattered and some are sorely out of date. Several examples on their own site didn’t work at all with 4.0.12
Overall I think I will be focusing my future efforts on Flex/ActionScript 3.0 and unfortunately leaving Laszlo behind. I have been a fan of it for quite a while but I don’t think it has kept up at all with Flex and is starting to lose mind-share amongst the Open-Source community.
