Fwd: [Laszlo-dev] Re: lazlo4java ideas

[Candide Kemmler]

Right you're raising philosophical/political questions here. Expected that.

Well, I'll try to get my points right...

1. It's interesting that you say that *flex* will be defeated by XAML,
because IMO, laszlo is very similar to both technologies, so if one wins,
both others are defeated altogether. I think this is because you consider
opensource projects as outsiders to the bigger IT battles. I think it no
longer is. They take part of it and sometimes they win.

2. to be able to effectively deploy XAML apps, you'll have to wait. A long
time. Vista is still in beta and we all know that until a significant user
base has upgraded to the next windows version, it generally takes years. But
their plans are very clear: the .NET platform, along with the frontend
technology (XAML) from Microsoft will be able to target about everything
with a silicon heart: the XBOX game console, PDAs, Media Centers as they
call them, etc...

3. JNDC is no competitor for laszlo IMO, because it is targeting desktop
apps. Not the least because of XAML, I think that the future of user
applications lies is in the web. Moreover, I think that the winning
technology is the one that will make these applications sexy, and XAML is
willing to this, and XAML supports 3D.

4. Macromedia and MS are doing their best to create end-to-end platforms.
And this is very normal, because that's what customers and average
developers are looking for. And maybe if we do not care, they will win. I
mean, and we all know it, there's danger here.

Conclusion:

The opensource community has to gather forces to create the winning
combination. Their strength is that, before the market is completely locked
(the market of tomorrow), they have solutions that work now, and on every
platform, and this is the market of today.

I agree completely with you: we should care about integrating laszlo with
other OS technologies. We need a place to share best practices. I have
developed my own, and I would love to share and confront them with others.
Personnally, I also think that developing a SOAP client for SOLO apps is a
must.

Furthermore, laszlo needs more of a development environment than ide4laszlo.
It needs something visually appealing to graphic designers.

Finally, ECMAScript is a bit weak a language to rest on. Specifically it
lacks the language foundations on which to build the more useful patterns
that all professional developers rely on when developing real code: private,
protected and public modifiers... and tons of others things.

Java is far more interesting for that matter. And it's all we really have as
an alternative to MS' CLR. Just for a reminder: the CLR is: "one platform
for all languages", while java is: "one language for all platforms". And I
think that the latter is much better, given the language is powerful enough.

But yes, you're right, this project cannot take off if its "political"
underpinnings are not clearly defined. I don't mean this is only for fun.

Candide

--
Candide Kemmler
3 rue du Bailli - 1000 Bruxelles
mobile:+32485067980
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://openlaszlo.org/pipermail/laszlo-dev/attachments/20051005/5f2e1fd7/attachment.html