Architecting Enterprise Applications

[jlehew]

If Laszlo was used to create a large application with 30+ client-server screens or 100+ web pages, what are some of the issues to consider along with pros and cons when architecting a Laszlo front-end for a medium/large size application.

For example would it be best to create a seperate LZX for each of the 30 screens and build a container with navigation and security in a normal web application?

It seems very practicle to build a 1-5 screen app based on the sample apps in Laszlo but how will it work with 30 screens in an app that needs security, error logging, navigation, etc. Is a mix of technologies required to build an enterprise web application.

Laszlo is VERY cool from what I've seen thus far. I'm building a dev environment to see what it can do.

Thanks!

[kmohamed1000]

This is a great question. My company is looking at a couple of different solutions, and our requirements are as posted above, just wondering if someone can take the time to answer the above post.

Thank you

[david]

The right answer is not to split the app into multple LZX apps -- you'll lose (some of) the RIA benefits. The best bet is to make this a single Laszlo app with a solid, well-thought out architecture *inside* the Laszlo app. The server should expose a set of services which the Laszlo app accesses.

Laszlo is in the process of building a rich Web mail product with a significant amount of client-side complexity. It's architected this way. There are potential pitfalls here, but the architecture is ultimately simpler than a hybrid HTML/Laszlo app or multiple LZX "pages" and the end-user responsiveness is excellent.

Oliver Steele wrote an excellent blog entry on how to think of client/server interaction in an RIA/Laszlo context. See:

http://osteele.com/archives/2004/12/serving-clients

[daredevil2000]

If your are using a monolitic lzx application running in a Flash player instance are you sure that the memory usage will not increase during all the user utilisation.

I've been told that the flash player does not have any Garbage collection mecanism (it is going to be implemented in the version 8).

If we reload the flash player reloading a new browser URL may free some memory.

[AlexDinamo]

I's a pitty this thread didn't went on.

I'm also disturbed about a big monolithic, Laszlo applicacion, and came to the same conclusions as in previous messages in this thread: a big Laszlo application should be cut into small pieces woven together by an HTML site.

Memory consumption and load/response time on the browser are my first concerns.

I guess that on the end, I mechanism on Laszlo to dynamically load views and/or libraries from the server would be ideal to address this issue. Is something like this planned? What other options do we have?

Saludos,
Alejandro Escalante Medina