BlackBox

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• The docs for OpenLaszlo are somewhat scattered and some are sorely out of date.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.

If you haven’t heard it by now you’re probably under a rock, but this I think is pretty slick, offline Web apps through a browser plugin (firefox, IE, windows, mac, and linux).

Google Gears is an API that lets you run your Web application in offline mode. Now some people don’t agree with this, but it is coming (Dojo Toolkit Offline and Slingshot for Rails are being developed right now and I’m sure there are more).

And I do agree with some of his points, and I honestly can’t say in which direction RIA is going to go, here are the options I see:

1. Desktop apps (swing, cocoa, whatever) that take advantage of web services and do mashups on a local app - probably requires something like Apple’s WebKit to do it well though.
2. Flash apps that can run locally and access remote web services
3. Ajax apps that can run locally and access remote web services
4. Or … all of the above.

One of the arguments that David talks about in his post is that you aren’t on a plane, yeah well sometimes I do go to a coffee shop (like Starbuck’s) that charges for wifi that I really don’t feel I should have to pay for and all of the things I have to do (my tasks) are stored in a web app. It would be really nice to have something like this available to me in those situations.

Another idea that was brought up to me by someone on the Tucson JUG list is something like an offline P2P app, or ITunes style application, which makes perfect sense. It combines the best of both worlds, online synchronization with offline capabilities.

Personally I think that this is a really interesting development and its been going around (dojo has offline, there’s something called Slingshot for rails apps, etc.).

Where does everyone see this thing going?