Visual Tool for Laszlo

[salw]

Are you planning to create a visual tool for simplification of creation user interface?

I think it would make Laszlo more popular.

[nmadness]

I'm thinking about creating one - depends on interest and time. After becoming frustrated with many authoring/development tools over the past few years I've been wanting to create my own, but I didn't want to create yet another runtime or format - and I had no intention (or possibility) of writing a language and compiler from scratch. When Laszlo went open-source I revisited this idea again...

More info can be found here:
http://bryan.nmadness.com/2004/10/idea-kinabalu_18.html

It's not really aimed at hardcore developers, but rather occasional developers/content creators that need/want to create rich-internet applications but don't want to have to commit to the investment that many professional level tools require. Not to say that it would be 'simple' - more of a starting point for people who prefer to work to work visually whenever possible. I strongly believe that it shouldn't 'dumb-down' the process, but rather provide a foundation for people to build on. Similar to the way Processing http://processing.org simplifies Java media programming, but does provide a way for more experienced/adventerous developers to take what they've learned with Processing and apply it with little change against Java.

Personally I really think there is/will be a need for a visual GUI editor for Laszlo - but I'm really not sure what form or features designers/developers would like. Should it be a plug-in to Eclipse that would allow for the layout of widgets similar to Swing or SWT? Should it be more like Dreamweaver or Flash... or can it be something completely different? Would it be strictly design focused or also developer friendly?

How do you imagine creating LZX documents visually?

[salw]

I've never been working with Dreamweaver and Flash.
I'm not an expert in GUI tool but I can imagine GUI Lazlo editor like Visual .NET.
For example: panel with Lazlo UI Components which can be drag'n'drop on a layout and mapped on the XML data or WebService result or something else.

The are many Java IDE Eclipse, IDEA, JBuilder. It's not enough to create a plugin only for Eclipse. In what form it should be - it's subject of the further discussions.

[pc]

I was going to say I'd like to see a Laszlo GUI IDE similar to Flex Builder (Laszlo Builder) that is an extension of Dreamweaver but after looking at Bryan's Kinabalu presentation I like the idea of a zero-install browser based IDE for Laszlo. :) It make sense to have an open-source IDE for the open-source Laszlo and makes even more sense to have the IDE written in LZX as a Laszlo app. I'm sure down the road it could be made to work offline as a standalone app outside the browser once Laszlo comes out with the server-less capabilities.

Since I use Dreamweaver for CFML & other app server dev, I would still like to have a Dreamweaver GUI IDE like Flex Builder for Laszlo dev along with the zero-install IDE. That would give flexibility for different projects. The zero-install IDE could be a good starting point for the presentation tier and would be good enough for simple/moderate apps. Complex appz could continue in DW side by side with the business logic & db tiers, etc..

I see that Snapp MX @ www.snappmx.com is using the same idea of a zero-install browser based IDE. Looks interesting. Maybe some of their ideas could be incorporated along with what is in Kinabalu into a Laszlo zero-install browser based IDE.

[wicki]

The zero footprint IDE in Snapp MX is definitely handy. The other thing I like is the fact that Snapp MX generates the web services you need to connect a UI to a DB table. You can then customize the code after the fact. What a tremendous time saver.

[norskog]

There is an IDE available for Eclipse that generates a generic XML description for UI layouts. If Laszlo supported this format, we get a UI layout editor for free. Also, since it's a separate file it becomes easy to have a bunch of "skins" for an app, from different UI layout description files.