REST and Laszlo - a match?

[cip22]

I was attracted to Laszlo by the open source initiative. Just installed a local server and begin to read the docs, so I'm a total newbie. But I need to get some things straight before I dive in (too) deep.

Being primarily concerned with large (and hopefully useable) information systems in art and culture, I have two questions, one 'philosophical' and one practical.

First the philosophical one: I see a certain gap between the 'one page' approach of Laszlo and W3Cs 'Representational State Transfer' approach (REST) which means practically - as I interpret it - that everything the client wants to express about the resource can be put into the URI. The question is: Does Laszlo - in principle - allow and support REST-compliant web applications?

In a more practical fashion, my question is if you would encourage the use of Laszlo for a kind of GUI-refined Wikipedia or similar project? Can I attach serach params to a Laszlo application URL? Is there a way to let search engine bots know what's 'in' the application if accessed through *this* URL?

[thewolf]

Hi,

Did you find any reply to your question?

I am looking for the same info ...

Thanks.

[Cort]

Hi Folks,

Sure, as long as your application can represent it's state via a string you can make it follow the REST way. The key thing is just notating all your states formally, refreshing the address field when state changes, and allowing access to any state randomly.

The wikipedia question is interesting, but I really don't know the answer. I've heard various ideas secondhand but have never looked into it myself.

I would think that you could create a very nice wiki editing and viewing interface for humans with laszlo, but for searh engines you would probably either need or want to have a different interface, such as the raw indexes or table of contents, or various topic pages. I know next to nothing of the search engines abilities really, and I believe that this is a problem. But the thing to mention is that the resulting content of a laszlo app, though edited in swf, still ends up as xml in the end.

So the abilities to interoperate with the search engines would probably come down to how flexible the search engines are. If you can't offer a search engine raw xml data files in a perfectly structured format, I think it's a real limitation with the search engine, but that's a problem that I think may exist with goodle and/or others.

I don't think that the automated bots can navigate swfs well, but I think that you would probably want to maintain a public interface to the information as xhtml or xml anyway for accesibility and automated searching, the laszlo part would just be a nice viewer for humans to access, search, organize, and personalize or edit the data.

Just my thoughts offhand.

-Cort