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Slide 1: Welcome to WEB 2.0 An Open Laszlo presentation Part 2 Carlos Fernando Scheidecker Antunes antunes@cs.utah.edu http://www.cs.utah.edu/~antunes/AJAX Feb 15 2006
Slide 2: What is WEB 2.0? • Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.
Slide 3: What is Laszlo ?
Slide 4: What is Laszlo ? • Laszlo is a rich client platform for web application. • Without realizing, it was the first AJAX application I ever written back in 2004 • It uses Flash, Java, XML and a Servlet engine to provide a rich client desktop like experience for the user. • It is the future of web and client server applications
Slide 5: Laszlo’s Components • Compiler Takes the XML text file (.lzx) and produces the executable in Flash. • CGI Use a Servlet, PHP, ASP.net to optionally provide http based SOAP and XML-RPC web services.
Slide 6: Laszlo’s Components • Run time Framework Set of Servlets that provide user interface components, data binding, timer, Asynchronous network services
Slide 7: Laszlo Overview
Slide 8: Coding with Laszlo • It is important to understand that Laszlo provides the user side. You can embed JavaScript within your Laszlo XML source code to program the client side. • Laszlo is the View share of the MVC pattern. • The business side resides on the CGI applications that provide data for the Desktop much like an AJAX pattern.
Slide 9: Example of Laszlo code • This is a simple valid LZX source file. Note the XML format: <canvas> • • • • • • • • • • • <dataset name="dset" autorequest="true" type="http" src="getemployees.jsp"/> <simplelayout axis="y"/> <view datapath="dset:/phonebook/employee"> <simplelayout axis="x"/> <text datapath="firstName/text()"/> <text datapath="lastName/text()"/> <text datapath="phone/text()"/> </view> </canvas>
Slide 10: Development cycle • Develop a Laszlo application requires the following steps: 1 - Define the data sources writing the appropriate CGI programs. These programs will work like a dynamic web application with the difference that data not content is provided and the format is XML
Slide 11: Development cycle • Develop a Laszlo application requires the following steps: 2 – Write the Laszlo source code and compile it through the Laszlo compiler which is a Servlet living inside a container like Tomcat
Slide 12: Development cycle • Develop a Laszlo application requires the following steps: 3 – Test your application 4 – Deploy the application
Slide 13: What’s the catch? • Laszlo is a great platform but it requires: 1 – Patience, it takes a while to compile the lzx. 2 – It is hard to code, you need to write a few applications to get proficiency with the platform. Learning curve. 3 – Understand AJAX and GUI application development. 4 – For large deployments clustering load balancing is a must.
Slide 14: Questions Have any questions, concerns or fears? This is the time.
Slide 15: Thank you! Please remember: I will keep the material, examples and source code on the following address: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~antunes/AJAX/ antunes@cs.utah.edu