Decision time - OpenLazlo bugs?

[rabinnh]

I have narrowed our choices for the Ajax UI layer to OpenLazlo and Dojo. What I like about OpenLazlo is ease of development. However, I have a few concerns.

I am running Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 and Firefox 3.5.8 I watched the entire 40 minutes programming tutorial screencast and was psyched. My next step was to view the documentation. That's when I started having concerns.

Clicking on the 4.71 HTML reference guide, the right hand pane displays fine. And the left hand pane shows tabs and the tree. The tabs work. The tree does not. There is simply no response.

Then I tried the demos. Almost all of them had some incompatibility that made them unusable. For example, the first demo is the Calender. If I click a day and then "Add Event", I get the input window on the right. However, I see now way to enter a day and time. Just a blank square with "to" in the middle.

Trying other demos, I had some issues with almost all of them.

I am afraid of what kind of testing nightmare or support nightmare this may cause for us with our users. Can anyone shed some light on the situation? How widespread are your applications? How many users? What is your feedback?

Thanks
rabinnh

[pugmaster]

I would advise purchasing a copy of "Laszlo in Action" (editorial note: I'm the author) as it provides a lot of supplementary information about Laszlo. This material is mandatory to build a well structured web application. The book also features a lengthy example application that exercises the major features within an RIA.

While some of the book's contents have become out-of-date -- it was written for lps-4.0.8 and lps-4.2 introduced a number of changes -- just about all of these changes involve simple naming conventions (use lz.xxx instead of LzXXX, and setAttribute("x" instead of setX). The core underlying features haven't changed. So it is still very relevant.

While there was a period of restructuring across the platforms that introduced a number of irritating bugs, the Laszlo developers have always been pretty responsive at fixing general bugs. They have been less responsive at fixing bugs that involve auxiliary areas such as SOAP or RPC.

Norman Klein
Author: Laszlo in Action