[Laszlo-user] Big pluses and minuses of using Laszlo?

[Benjamin Shine]

On Jun 20, 2006, at 10:18 AM, William Krick wrote:

> 2) UI flow control and validation.  It's difficult in OL to force  
> the user
> to progress through a complex application in a linear fashion,  
> especially
> when program flow needs to be halted due to invalid input.  There  
> was a
> "shouldYieldFocus" method added that helps with this somewhat but  
> it's still
> rough.  The whole problem requires a re-think of the way that  
> applications
> are designed when there is a lot of input that needs to be  
> validated before
> progressing forward.

William, check out the registration process for LaszloMail  
(www.laszlomail.com). We developed a pattern for that process that  
let us lead the user through a linear sequence of forms, validating  
user input as we go. This was particularly difficult code, imho, and  
we only got through it with help from most of the Laszlo Systems  
client-side heavy-hitters: Antun Karlovac, our training guy, Bret  
Simister, who designed the animation system, and Sarah Allen, who  
made it all work while the app was loading in the background.

That code is not public, and it's been a few months since I've worked  
on it, but IIRC, it's heavily based on <state>s. Maybe a future  
version of Open Laszlo can include explicit support for this kind of  
linear, forms-based process. So far we've avoided it in large part of  
because of a certain UI/information architecture design. Now that  
we're being used for applications designed by people other than  
Laszlo Systems UI designers :) maybe we should look to extending our  
API to support other interaction models.

Which is not to say that the Laszlo Mail registration process used  
any "core" platform programming; it was all lzx code, components and  
events and data handlers -- so a linear-forms-process-pattern could  
be designed and implemented by an external contributor, with a bit of  
advice from us. Anybody interested in taking this on?

benjamin shine
software engineer
ben at laszlosystems.com