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09/25/2005: "IT Conversations - Converstion with David Temkin"
This looks interesting. It's an episode of IT Conversations where David Temkin, CTO of LaszloSystems (makers of OpenLaszlo) is interviewed. From the IT Conversations page:
Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia's Flash player to deliver richer Web experiences. David Temkin tells us why he chose the Flash player as a platform. Laszlo went open source and chose IBM's Common Public License as it was flexible enough to fit their needs without curbing commercial use.
David plans to leverage rich client environments other than Flash Player, such as DHTML, Java and .Net and shares his about thoughts about Eclipse, the recent Adobe/Macromedia merger, refactoring the desktop user interface and calendar interoperability. He also explains why Flash is not an ideal platform for mobile devies and desktop applications and compares Laszlo Blog Boxes to widgets in Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Konfabulator.
It looks like the IT Conversations site has been streamlined a bit... I was able to download the mp3 without having to jump through hoops. Thumbs-up on that one, Mr. Kaye. 
I was piddlefarting around with OpenLaszlo a few months ago, and was basically on the cusp of doing something useful with it... but got sidetracked (of course). I found that the documentation was a bit too sparse for my liking. OpenLaszlo needs a good solid tutorial that walks one through creating a simple application that includes non-trivial bi-directional client-server communication (maybe like a blog editor or something). Most of the samples send simple parameters to the server and get an XML response back. Most of the stuff I'd want to do aren't uber-complicated, but it'd be helpful to have some of that spelled out in a decent, well-written tutorial.
While I like OpenLaszlo overall, I find myself caught up in trying to figure out how to do things that seem like they should be simple, or at least documented somewhere other than in sample code.
While yes, I could spend a couple of thousand dollars to go to one of their training seminars, I'm not gonna. I'd consider writing said client-server sample app tutorial, but a) I don't have the time, b) I'm not really a big enough Laszlo fanboy, and c) I don't think I'd want to deal with the nitpicky comments from internet folks. I dunno. Right now I'm busy working on learning to Think In Java.
Actually, I wrote a simple thing to play around with Laszlo forms and to look at the server response. Perhaps I'll post that sometime soon and see how bad the razzing is.
