Laszlo at AJAXWorld in Santa Clara

Laszlo will be at the west-coast AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara on September 23 – 27, 2007. Laszlo is the Diamond Sponsor again, and we have a day-long track of sessions scheduled for September 24. We’ll be showcasing OpenLaszlo, Webtop, and David Temkin, Laszlo’s founder, will be delivering a keynote presentation on RIAs. I’ll be holding a Hands-On OpenLaszlo Training session at the end of the day. (Attendees encouraged to bring laptops).

If you’re planning to be at AJAXWorld, please stop by and say hello. If not, maybe it’s time to register…
Laszlo AJAXWorld microsite: http://laszlo.sys-con.com/

LZProject Application

LZProject was released yesterday on the OpenLaszlo site. (See LZProject). It’s a “blueprint” application, i.e. a complete, functioning application that’s designed to educate developers as to how to architect OpenLaszlo applications. LZProject is a project management/task-tracking Rich Internet Application (RIA) written in OpenLaszlo. It compiles to both DHTML and Flash.

From an educational perspective, it shows developers how to do the following using OpenLaszlo:

Plan both the overall and client-side architectures of an application.
Deal with multiple “screens”.
Handle authentication.
Perform typical CRUD (Create, Update and Delete) operations on a variety of data.
Internationalization (I8n) – LZProject can be viewed in English, German and Korean. All the labels and messaging are controlled by the server.
Client and server validation.

The application was designed and written by Raju Bitter, OpenLaszlo’s Developer Community Manager. I’ve wanted to introduce Raju for some time, and this application gives me the perfect opportunity. Before joining Laszlo Systems, Raju operated a consultancy specializing in OpenLaszlo RIA development, so his experience in practical OpenLaszlo development was critical to this project. (Read Raju’s Blog).
The project page is probably the best starting place. It links to running copies of the application, a white paper, and of course the LZX and Java source code.
LZProject really does cover all the frequently-asked, complex, how-to questions. I think it will prove to be an excellent resource for developers looking for the “big picture” in OpenLaszlo.

View Source Code

It’s always handy to take a peek at the source code for a class you’re using, to see how it works. Of course, every attribute, method and event should be documented in detail, but sometimes they’re not, and you need access to the source code. With OpenLaszlo Lz components (e.g. button, edittext, etc.), that’s pretty straightforward. You just look at your local developer install of OpenLaszlo, under lps/components/lz/….

With Laszlo Foundation Classes, such as view, the source code is not present in the developer distribution. So unless you have an OpenLaszlo build environment, you won’t find it in your file system.

All is not lost, however, since the OpenLaszlo project uses Subversion for source control. That means that you can browse the source code via the web interface:

http://svn.openlaszlo.org/openlaszlo/

The very latest view code (from trunk) is located here. And the view code from OpenLaszlo 3.4 is located here. The Laszlo Foundation Class code is generally found in WEB-INF/lps/lfc/… of that particular version.