Improving Laszlo.
When I am onto something, it is difficult to let go. Laszlo has been on my mind all day. Here are some thoughts on improving Laszlo:
Laszlo IDE
Laszlo needs an IDE. Currently people are expected to use whatever editor they have to edit LZX files. Eclipse is the best IDE technology out there, so integrating Laszlo with Eclipse makes sense.
Faster LZX Compiler
Engineers should not have to wait to see the result of changes they made during development, particularly at presentation level. I don't know why LZX compilation seem so slow, but this must be fixed ASAP. Here are some options:
- Compile Laszlo and JGenerator to native code
- Incremental LZX compilation
- Finer-grained SWF generation and caching
- Client-side weaving of SWF fragments
Wizards
Provide wizards to ease common tasks and solve common issues such as Page Back and Browser Resize problems. [Don Park's Blog]
Would I want to live in Laszlo?.
By nature, I am very enthusiastic and generous with both complements and condemnations. So it is understandable that some of my readers think my recent posts on Laszlo are outright recommendations for Laszlo. They are not. I thought I should make this clear before the confuson spreads any further.
What I have written before are what an excitable traveller might have said while touring through Three Gorges or Grand Canyon. This post is what the traveller might have said at the end of the trip, in response to the question "Would you want to live here?"
In short, my answer is no. I will have to post the longer version later, but my answer has a lot to do with why I decided not to pursue an idea similar to Laszlo while back.
I apologize if I confused you. I believe in simplicity, but I am far from being a simple person. [Don Park's Blog]
Lots of great feedback from Don.
I should make something perfectly clear. I have had to compromise my ideals over the years. Time was that I wouldn't tolerate anything that wasn't instantly fast. I knew that end-users would not tolerate that themselves, so I wouldn't either. That was my gripe with teh web and HTML. It's slowness made it irrelevant to me. So I took the 90's off.
Time was that I demanded infinite bandwidth, tons of storage, gobs of RAM and no issues whatever - that would stand in the way of someone trying to get something done. But those ideal days are gone forever.
No I put up with slow systems. As I clicked on my 'topic' button, calling up my k-collector topic assignment tool, I waited. As I fired up my Radio blogging tool - I waited. As I do a Google search or even a Dictionary.com search - I wait. The web is all about waiting.
Only the radio and TV worlds don't wait. We computer nerds will need at least another generation or two before we can get away with this 'waiting stuff'. The good news is that the humans expect that. Computer stuff breaks, doesn't work all the time, is slow and is less than perfect. That's the world we're in right now.
So if Laszlo is slow now - I can live with that. We've spent six months getting the WebOutliner to be perfect in all browsers - and we're still not done yet. Laszlo can get you the SAME UI running on ALL platforms - without any special modifications or platform support. THAT's the goal.
That's what we tried to do in 1988 - when we first invented cross-platform multimecdia authoring. It's 15 years later and we're still waiting for that. Only it's pretty hard to do that with timelines. So Laszlo (and eventually Royale) give you that - a non-timeline based development environment.
If you're happy with HTML, shitty looking interfaces and round-trip http puts and gets - then keep using what you're using. But if you wanna change all that - change your life - then check out Laszlo.
The biggest problem with technology today may be the lack of stuff that sucks. 
You can see it all clearly in 
