Laszlo Presentation Server - A quick review

A few days ago I download the Laszlo Presentation Server (LPS). There had been a lot buzz about this product, which incidentally is only about two weeks old, and as per the email I received from them, has only had a closed developer release as of now. This explained why the download was not available freely on the site. Overall, my user experience with the whole process of getting the server and installing it was really good. The server itself is not too heavy (17 odd MB for the DR version which has Jakarta Tomcat bundled with it) and after I got it installed, I was able to get working with LZX files right away. The help on the site is not yet complete (they do warn you about this) but there is enough information to get you started.

Anybody who has used XML, and JavaScript/ActionScript before should be able to get a handle of LPS pretty easily. There are basic tags that define UI elements like <canvas>, <button>, <text> and <window> which help you build your application and new components or classes can be included (using <include>) easily extending the capabilities of the API.

The scripting language is ECMAscript based and since the definition is XML based, you cannot really use the less than and greater than signs, so all scripts have to be included into a <![CDATA]> tag, very much like SVG in fact. They have included a debug extension with the API so you can debug your application just like you’d use the trace function if Flash. There is no visual IDE, so you’ll have to use EditPlus or whatever your favorite text editor is to write out the code. Also since it’s all XML, you can also use XML spy to write out the code. I used my favorite – TextPad.

The version that I download uses Tomcat as the servelt engine, but I should imagine that it does work with any other Appservers as well.

I have not done any extensive testing on the server so I cannot at the moment comment on the performance and other issues with the server. But here is quick SWOT analysis that might help you:

Strength: There is currently a demand for richer web based applications and a lot of industry experts are touting that Flash would be filling in this need. Laszlo is betting on this increase in Flash based RIAs and hopes it would be seen as a more painless solution since they would not have to deal with complex and animation oriented IDE that Flash presents them with. Moreover the ability to use an normal to text editor to produce Flash applications would definitely strike a chord with the Linux community who have been desperately looking for an IDE for Flash.

Weakness: This is a server-based solution a bit like what Generator used to be. In fact my first though was that this would have been a natural progression for Generator had Macromedia continued the tool. However, Macromedia did not see Generator as a viable tool to continue, would Laszlo be looked upon in a different light? Also Flash is not a standard, if you’re looking at a Standards based Enterprise Web Application development market, it would have been worthwhile to port SVG as an optional delivery platform. On the other hand this is a servlet-based solution while a majority of the Flash development community work with PHP. Would they switch to Laszlo and a Tomcat/J2EE dev environment?

Opportunities: They currently do not have any commercial competition doing exactly the same thing. Macromedia has discontinued Generator and Ming is too obscure right now to be considered as a threat. So they definitely have made the move at the right time (can’t really call this an early move though.) Also there is definitely a move to have an XML based standard for defining the application UI, so using XML was definitely the right way to go.

Threats: There are other client based UI rendering vendors like Altio and Vultus, which do not require the use of a plugin for rendering the UI. Also there is of course, Flash, which has an active and loyal developer community and support from the mother ship for web application developers. Also around the corner are other XML based U definitions like WSUI and XUL, which are slowly getting more attention.

All in all, I do believe Laszlo has come out with an interesting product and anybody developing web applications should certainly download and test-drive the presentation server. However it is just too early to make any predictions. We will have to wait for the market to mature and see who survives.

Cheers
Nav

Posted by Navneet at February 8, 2003 06:21 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam