[Laszlo-user] Actionscript library call from lzx

[Aral Balkan]

Hi David,

Just for the record, I do agree with a lot of Cort's observations about 
Laszlo: The elegant components, outstanding documentation, etc. Great 
stuff. What got me interested in it again is the serverless SWF 
generation feature in 3.0b2 (although I haven't really been able to get 
this to work -- the compiler didn't seem to install on my machine -- at 
least it's not in the location stated in the docs.)

Regarding what I aim to accomplish:

1. Evaluate the possibility of using Laszlo on a future project without 
large relearning process for the team
2. Use our open-source pattern-based framework (ARP) in Laszlo projects 
(http://ariaware.com/products/arp)
3. Evaluate our ability to adapt to future virtual machines without 
waiting for feature implementations in Laszlo

I see Laszlo as a great solution that's available today. That said, I 
can (and do) use Flex today because it requires very little relearning. 
Where I will go an learn a new model, it will most likely be XAML due to 
its wide applicability (in other words, I don't see the value of 
investing time in learning yet-another-markup-language that has a single 
application.) If/when Xamlon lives up to its promises, I can easily 
transfer my MXML and ActionScript 2 knowledge to XAML and C# (I 
currently dabble in the latter in any case.)

I would hate to get "locked in" to Laszlo currently. We went through 
this with Flash. Finding advanced Flash developers has always been 
difficult due to the unique nature of Flash. Now, with ActionScript 2, 
Flex and our pattern-based framework, we can take anyone versed in OOP 
and get them working on Flash projects in a few days. Laszlo would be a 
step backwards for us in this regard.

That said, allowing Laszlo to load in arbitrary SWFs will make it much 
more flexible and possibly much more attractive to a larger number of 
people and will allow a larger number of people to expand upon it.

All the best,
Aral

David Temkin wrote:

>Aral, 
>
>Before going down the route of trying to extend the platform with native
>Flash, I recommend that you look at Laszlo's built-in extensible component
>model. You can create your own components that can do, with very few
>exceptions, everything you could do with embedding a Flash-authored SWF.
>
>Of course that doesn't help you much if you want to reuse code that you've
>already written in Flash. What are you aiming to accomplish here?
>
>- D.
>