Laszlo in Action - Basic Query

Howdy Authors (Norman Klein and Max Carlson with Glenn MacEwen),

First of all, the term 'Laszlo' is pretty new to me and i am hearing it for the first time.

After going through the Preface in the Book link of Manning also i could not come to a conclusion. All it says from the beginning is "it is an open source platform" for developing web applications. But the overall content speaks all about Ajax, DHTML,Flash, Struts, Ruby On Rails, etc,.

Where it stands? Is it on the Front end or Back end? Is it a common platform for developing web applications?

I know it is a pretty layman question. It would be so great if you could clarify this.

Thank you

OpenLaszlo is a technology that converts an XML markup and scripting into Flash (SWF) files as well as more recently DHTML (AJAX, HTML, & JavaScript). Its basically Flex although OL has been around much longer than Flex and OL has more than one renderer.
[ January 22, 2008: Message edited by: Gregg Bolinger ]

so trying to harness OL with servlets and JSON is a no-no? I don't really know anything about it. I'm just wondering about its interworkability(new word, should be submitted to websters) with other web application technologies.

Actually, it is a yes-yes. Since OpenLaszlo is open source it works well with other open source technologies. It only requires an HTTP server that supplies XML over HTTP, something which every web server can easily do.

As a supplement to the book, we have provided chapters that deals with interfacing to Struts and Ruby on Rails. We picked those two web frameworks because they are the most popular, but *any* web server can interface to OL.

Laszlo can also work with JSON (although this isn't covered in the book. But here is a link describing the libraries needed to make it work.
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=LaszloWithoutXML

- Norman Klein

Very cool. Thanks a ton

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
OpenLaszlo is a technology that converts an XML markup and scripting into Flash (SWF) files as well as more recently DHTML (AJAX, HTML, & JavaScript). Its basically Flex although OL has been around much longer than Flex and OL has more than one renderer.

That's great Thank you Gregg! It helped me to get an overview!

Originally posted by Norman Klein:
..
As a supplement to the book, we have provided chapters that deals with interfacing to Struts and Ruby on Rails. We picked those two web frameworks because they are the most popular, but *any* web server can interface to OL.

Yes, i have seen those links in the website. Thank you Norman Klein.