[Laszlo-user] Laszlo Development

[Andrew McLaughlin]

Excellent post!

Unfortunately (or fortunately), I use IntelliJ IDEA for all my  
development. I've tried using Eclipse, and it just seems too bizarre  
for me to comprehend. At any rate, having the XSD will help  
tremendously as at least it will show me all optional and required  
attributes for each tag.

I like how each part of the layout is organized in nested views and  
will make heavy use of that. Can you recommend a good structure for  
each lzx file? I sure wish that Laszlo in Action were already in  
print. Reading docs online can be a drag sometimes... :)

Andrew


On Jul 10, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Geoff Crawford wrote:

> At 11:58 AM 7/10/2007, Andrew McLaughlin wrote:
>
>> I'm just starting out on a pretty ambitious project to develop a
>> sales order entry Laszlo app (interfacing to MySQL via JSP). Laszlo
>> will be used strictly in an Ajax mode in that all data will be loaded
>> on the fly from the service, displaying a pop up list of parts as
>> they enter items or descriptions, showing the unit and extended price
>> as they enter values and even checking stock and showing if a line
>> item will be backordered once committed.
>
> Not too different from what we've already been doing for
> about 3 months now for one of our clients.
>
>> So far, I'm totally confident in what it will take to build the
>> middle and back tiers, however I'm a little concerned regarding
>> Laszlo. Heretofore, I would have built this using straight Struts,
>> but wanted to give the client a little more bang for the buck.
>
> Absolutely - something like struts is going to be very slow
> coding and this will give a much better look and feel as well.
>
>> Question is: Is there any sort of GUI dev tool to layout the Laszlo
>> widgets or is it all hand XML coding?
>
> Check in the list archives, this was a long discussion back in April
> about Laszlo's direction now that Version 4 was delivered.  A solid
> IDE is high on that list.  It seems there was an IBM sponsored
> project in Eclipse at one point but that died out, was no longer
> maintained, and got stale.  There are some places where the code
> seems to be still around, but I could never get it running even
> with the specific versions of older Eclipse it supposedly required.
>
> There is an editor more than a full IDE. (it doesn't do visual
> layout, but it does have full drag and drop of code blocks
> for each widget)  It's an eclipse plugin from Spket (www.spket.com)
> which gives a tree view of the code, color coded syntax, code
> completion, etc.  all the things you'd expect from eclipse -
> it just doesn't visualize the code for you to do layout.
>
> That said - my impression doing a lot more Laszlo now than I
> did when that first thread happened, I understand why not
> everyone is just clamoring for the visual layout tool.  As
> long as you want simple sets of values to edit they're usually
> layed out evenly spaced on the y axis, and occasionally along
> the x.  If you simply group each set of values into its own
> view, and drop a <simplelayout> in the view, Laszlo does all
> the work for you.
>
>>  Is there at least a XSD or even  a DTD that I can leverage to  
>> speed up the effort?
>
> Yes, it's already in the distribution, look under the "tools"
> directory where you'll find lzx.xsd.  There are also some other
> formats of the grammar, and even a file for vim and one for
> emacs.  (.el)
>
>
> ====================================================================== 
> =
> Geoff Crawford                       Phone:            (973) 361 -  
> 4224
> Innov8 Computer Solutions, LLC       FAX:              (973) 537 -  
> 6946
> 711 Route 10 East, Suite 204         Email:           
> geoff at innov8cs.com
> Randolph NJ 07869                    Web: http:// 
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>
>                  ProcessWare ERP for the Chemical Industry
>
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