http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/06/28/railsconf-mike-pence-laszlo en-us 40 do what you love <p>Mike Pence, professional web surfer, and Java free since March 15, talked about <em>Sex, drugs, rock and roll</em> or <em>Laszlo on Rails</em>.</p> <h2>Where are we going on the web?</h2> <ul> <li>Google Maps, Yahoo Music Engine, Google Spreadsheets &#8211; the web is looking more and more like a desktop application.</li> <li>&#8220;Web two oh&#8221; &#8211; attention to design and more attractive interfaces</li> <li>User customization a.k.a. &#8220;Pimp my site&#8221;</li> <li>Use of rich media on the web, e.g., YouTube. It&#8217;s an expectation of the next generation of users that the web will be content-rich and an entertainment experience.</li> <li>The Holy Grail! Applications that require no downloads, are instant/automatically updated, are distributed.</li> </ul> <h2>Open Laszlo</h2> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.pandora.com">Pandora</a> cited as an introductory example</li> <li>Mike gave a 10 minute overview of Laszlo using the Open Laszlo Explorer.</li> <li>Laszlo explorer shows you standard widgetry &#8211; canvas, text, buttons, windows, forms</li> <li>The power of Laszlo starts to show with data sets, with convenient data binding utilities, an extensible object model, and a declarative style. Mike showed 10 lines of code with a checkbox that controlled the visibility of a window, without having to attach an event handler to the checkbox.</li> <li><a href="http://www.openlaszlo.org/">http://www.openlaszlo.org/</a> has the 10 minute overview (explorer) and many other demos including LZPIX, which Mike demoed.</li> <li>The newest version of Laszlo has DHTML support that allows a flash app to be served as DHTML instead, with little difference. Laszlo gives you the power of one runtime that rises above browser incompatibilities.</li> </ul> <h2>Laszlo on Rails</h2> <ul> <li>Install # install laszlo gem install ropenlaszlo rails laszlo-app &amp;&amp; cd laszlo-app ./script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/laszlo-plugin/tags/openlaszlo</li> <li>More info at <a href="http://laszlo-plugin.rubyforge.org/">http://laszlo-plugin.rubyforge.org/</a></li> </ul> <h2>Pros &amp; Cons</h2> <ul> <li>Pro: Rich possibilities <ul> <li>Blogbox &#8211; cross-site window</li> <li>Publish and subscribe for chat and collaboration, event-driven updates</li> </ul></li> <li>Pro: deep API</li> <li>Pro: in-browser development, like Seaside</li> <li>Con: Consumes resources</li> <li>Con: Accessibility, printability and searchability are not its strengths</li> <li>Con: mature, yet requires experimentation</li> <li>Con: performance can be an issue, especially on some older platforms</li> </ul> <p>Store it away &#8211; Laszlo is a promising technology, it&#8217;s free and open source it&#8217;s here today, and it appears to be getting good at serving standards-based interfaces. When combined with Rails&#8217; increasing support for RESTian interfaces, the task of building compatible, dynamic applications should only get easier.</p> Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:00:00 +0000 urn:uuid:1cf8443e-d948-41d8-81cd-166a92b98ab3 Nick Sieger http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/06/28/railsconf-mike-pence-laszlo ruby rails railsconf http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/trackback/31