Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

OpenLaszlo is not going to work

Our two summer interns have been toiling in their own individual ways, learning what appears to be the next-big-thing, OpenLaszlo. It's very remarkable technology, capable of taking some written scripts, and then kicking out Flash files which look amazing. Even better, and the feature that enticed us to use them, was the new render engine that they purport to have, which kicks out DHTML, using the same scripts on the back-end. Very, very neat.

However, we found out yesterday, after doing some digging, that the actual support will not be around until sometime in late 2006. Since my summer interns will likely only be around for the summer (though this is yet to be determined), we will need a way to either get the OpenLaszlo team to hurry up (not likely), or look at a different front-end technology.

My main requirement for a front-end technology is to have something that can be picked up very, very quickly. Light speed. I don't want my two developers sitting on their hands for three weeks while they learn the intricacies of Spring and Tomcat and Hibernate, etc.... Just so they have the stack that they need to develop a front-end. That's not very much fun, and is a poor use of our dollars, probably taking at least 6 weeks to pick up fully.

We've been discussing some other possibilities, including writing the View component in an entirely different language. Java is being used on the back-end, because it gives us lots of integration capabilities, some of which are not yet found in the Ruby or pop's of the world. It also gives us a wealth of back-up programmers in case our current employees decide to mutiny.

However, the complexity of the stack on the back-end has cause for some difficulties going forward, and certainly for the summer. Development with java, of a web-based front-end, can take hours and hours, assuming you picked the right library. And which one to choose? GWT is getting a lot of press. But there's also dojo, or AjaxAnywhere. Or we could roll our own using Prototype.js or any of the other libraries.

Our current train of thought is to use something much simpler, something like PHP or Ruby on the front-end, to be able to bind to the XML services (this would force our system to have web services). Now, the main question is, which one?

posted by Anthony Presley @ 6:18 AM