Adobe Flex vs openlaszlo

Question

I am currently working on an RIA project in flex, but I recently met openlaszlo . It seems that many large projects have chosen it for flexibility, for example, streaming music service Pandora. I wonder why. So far, the biggest advantage I've seen is that it has an abstraction level to support flash memory of 6.7, 8, 9 and dhtml and has been under development for a longer time (possibly more stable).

Has anyone had much experience using both, or just openlaszlo? Is support for dhtml and older flash versions really a big advantage with the popularity of flash 9 these days? Maybe it's just because many developers are already comfortable with javascript / ajax? In addition to language preferences, why openlaszlo and not flex?

Thanks for any tips! Ryan

Answer 1

When companies like Pandora chose OpenLaszlo, Flex was still a commercial product (even a compiler). Flex versions 1.0 and 1.5 were not very stable, and only with the release of 2.0 Flex did the platform become much more stable. Macromedia has broken many developers because Flex 2.0 is not compatible with 1.5, and all applications had to be rewritten for the new version. In this situation, many companies thought OpenLaszlo was not a bad choice.

The most powerful feature of OpenLaszlo is the LZX language. The language supports classes, animation of any numerical property, restrictions using the syntax attribute = "$ {}", mixin support, data sets with matching based on datapath data (based on xPath). Some of the key LZX langauge developers have previously worked on the Apple Dylan language, and many powerful Dylan concepts have turned it into the LZX language.

I developed OpenLaszlo and Flex. Flex has excellent tool support by various IDE providers. But ActionScript 3 can be very limited, since in Java you think a lot about your class model. OpenLaszlo emphasizes instance-based development (very fast for prototyping, although it is still possible to create very complex applications with 100k + lines of LZX code). The largest OpenLaszlo applications that I know of are Laszlo Webtop (120K + lines of LZX code) and IBM Websphere Commerce Edition (http://ibm.co/Kid5tc). I heard that other companies have created equally large applications using OpenLaszlo.

Starting with version 4.2, OpenLaszlo integrates the Flex SDK. The OpenLaszlo compiler generates LZX code in JavaScript 2, and then in ActionScript 3 code. If you compile the application for both DHTML and SWF10 +, you can profit from better Flex compiler type checking, even if your application is deployed only for the environment DHTML / HTML5 runtime.

OpenLaszlo is very stable. The last major release (4.0) was in March 2007, although the OpenLaszlo team considered release 4.2 to be the main version update, as it added support for ActionScript 3 and SWF9 for the platform. 4.2 was released in December 2008, the current stable release is version 4.9, although many community members and Laszlo already use OpenLaszlo 5.0 (trunk, unreleased) in production.

Following the announcement of Adobe to introduce the Flex SDK to the Apache Foundation (now the Apache Foundation Incubator project), Adobe announced that they were working on a cross-compilation function for the next-generation Flex compiler called FalconJS. Adobe also stated that FalconJS (which is likely to be introduced in Apache Flex in the fourth quarter of 2012) will not be able to cross-compile existing Flex applications in JavaScript. An example of a simple FalconJS example (as shown in December 2011) was generated in 5 MB of uncompressed JavaScript code, which could be minimized to 2.5 MB using the Google Closure advanced compiler mode. A similar OpenLaszlo example in the DHTML runtime is less than 750k JavaScript code.

Answer 2

I think your term "many large projects" is very relative. Yes, some large companies used it, but I do not consider any of them major projects. If you look at all of them in the OpenLaszlo storefront, they seem like pretty simple interfaces to me. Also note that OpenLazslo compiles Flash, not Flex, and its associated infrastructure.

For me, OpenLaszlo is an alternative to creating simple RIAs so that the final code can be compiled into Flash or Javascript. HaXe is another alternative to this, and I think it works better than OpenLaszlo.

With that said, there is a problem with these "generic" entries once, compile flash framework / Javascript; it does not use any strength / advantages of each specific platform. Flash is constantly changing, as well as Javascript with the addition of html5 and css3 tags. If you have experience in both cases, you will notice that they are very different in how they do it, and the algorithm may work well with Flash, perhaps not with Javascript.

My point is, if you want to choose a technology, go to the one that is more suitable. If your project has both Javascript and Flash, then this may be a good choice, but remember that you will lose everyone’s “power”. For example, Flex has a very good skin architecture and a set of tools necessary for the development of the enterprise. Javascript can do some pretty neat things with selectors, css3 and some other frameworks like jQuery.

In my experience, post-compilers like OpenLaszlo eliminate these strengths. Also, if there is anything new (e.g. hardware accelerated video / 3d for javascript / flash), you need to wait for people in OpenLazslo to be updated before you can use it (if they use it).

Answer 3

I started developing RIA with OpenLaszlo, as I was offering a cross browser that works in any form. The user experience delivered with it was also very good.

I switched to Flex (when it was in beta) because:

• Each OpenLaszlo feature is available in Flex.
• Flex had the added benefit of being a supported commercial product from Macromedia, a leading multimedia content company, and then acquired by Adobe.
• Flash Builder (aka Flex Builder), built on Eclipse, provides a good performance boost. (so a one-time license fee is not a problem at all)
• First of all, Flex has the best integration / remote server integration capability.
• There were a lot of tutorials and code examples in Flex, so creating a new developer was very easy.

Flex is now also a community-based open source project under the Apache Software Foundation OpenLaszlo now provides an additional feature through Flex (until there is a cross FalconJS compiler) that it can run Flash and Ajax runtime with a single code base.

Nevertheless, Flex has the additional advantage of having a very good development environment (with integration with other Adobe design tools) and a good server-side integration ability, so Flex is a clear winner for enterprise applications.