We believe that it's easiest to learn through working with a "hands-on" example, so we created the "Laszlo Market" as a full-length application that illuminates all of the important concepts covered within our "Laszlo in Action" book. You can view our Laszlo Market application at
http://demo.laszloinaction.com/products/SKU-004 You might wonder "hasn't the online store metaphor already been covered to death". But the online store is still the "killer app" of the Web. It's almost obligatory now to feature an online store example along with the introductory "Hello World" example. Besides, today's online stores suck. This isn't just an opinion, but a fact measured by an "abandoned cart" rate. Today's online stores take seven steps to perform checkout that each requires a round-trip journey to the server. This provides seven opportunities for customers to just say "screw it" and go to another website. We have re-implemented the online store as a Laszlo application to demonstrate the benefits of an RIA approach. The goal of this store is to have its operation be so intuitive that my mother could use it. This is a tall order, because my mother doesn't even use a computer.
This store has the following features:
1.Uses animation to support multiple virtual screens within a physical screen (Press "checkout" button")
2.Supports "copy" drag and drop operations from the Product List to the Shopping Cart
3.Supports "move" drag and drop operations from the Shopping Cart to the trash
4.Features a branded appearance using customized components directed toward a target audience of twenty-something males (action video fans)
5.How to use animation in a functional manner
6.Demonstrates the Master-Detail design
pattern between the Product Listing and Detail windows
7.Maintain identical appearance and operation between Flash and DHTML versions
In later chapters, we cover how video icons can be played by dragging and dropping them into the media player. Right now, we only have the Flash version online, but the DHTML version looks pretty much identical. So generally need to check the options with the right mouse button to determine which version is displayed. The person that has access to the server is unavailable right now, but I'll try and get the DHTML version available soon.
Although the book is complete now, we want to always be extending the store's operations to demonstrate different features. So I'm interested in hearing people's opinions about our example application.
1.Would your mother feel comfortable using this application?
2.How difficult or easy would this be to write this in your favorite RIA language?
3.What do you like or dislike about this application.
4.What features would you like to see added?
5.Any misc. things that you might want to comment on
Thanks your comments are appreciated and might be included in updates to this store application.
Norman Klein
