Question for the LZX language designers :-)

[lyndonwong]

Hi there Laszlo team,

After taking a look at the language documentation for Konfabulator, I noticed uncanny parallels between that and the LZX language.

www.konfabulator.com

Any comments on how these otherwise divergent efforts ended up with such a similar authoring approach? I find this indicator of "an idea whose time has arrived" quite intriguing!

[neversmith]

There are only so many ways that you can express UI components declaratively.

Mozilla takes the same approach with XUL

http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xptoolkit/xulintro.html

Isomorphic takes the same approach for DHTML

http://www.isomorphic.com

Altio takes the same approach for Java

http://www.altio.com

And now Laszlo for Flash!

The amazing thing is that it has taken so long for this approach to reach critical mass. XUL was specified what, four years ago?

[esc_oblivion]

I checked out Konfabulator, and while it looks like it can pull off some nice stuff, it (unfortunately) is for Mac ONLY. Like XUL, the problem with most approaches to this sort of thing is that they require minority tools - like Macintosh Computers, or the Mozilla engine, or their own proprietary DHTML engine, etc...

This is what separates Laszlo from the rest. They have built a powerful platform, and made it system independent. Initially they were wise enough to use the Flash player to run Laszlo apps, a very wise move as the Flash player has spent years evolving into what it is today - becoming platform independent, and attaining worldwide saturation (99%). Not even windows has that kind of saturation... such is the wonder of flash, it runs on windows, linux, and mac, so it bridges all those boundaries.

At this point, other than Macromedia's own Flex, I have yet to see another solution like Laszlo. Every other solution that I've seen has substantial issues to broad acceptance... whether it's visual components and elements that are lacking, a less than powerful platform, limited platform availability, etc.

Welcome to Laszlo!