Where to Go from Here
What I have covered so far about Laszlo falls under language
fundamentals. LZX is a fusion of three language concepts: XML, OO
programming, and JavaScript. You will need to spend some time with
LZX to know how these three concepts are melded together,
especially in the use of instance methods. Also, in JavaScript, the
terms object, dictionary, and array can be used synonymously: this
idea is used more extensively in LZX. You will need to brush up
on these concepts of JavaScript one more time to develop successfully
in Laszlo.
I also have touched briefly on Laszlo's visual programming model,
involving components and events. Obviously, there is a lot more to
the visual programming side if you want to do practical programs.
In particular, you will need to master the various visual
components that come with Laszlo. For example, you'll find a grid
control and a tree control among the list of components that you
can use to build your applications.
One area I haven't even touched in this article is the data
handling side of Laszlo. It uses data binding and XML navigation
extensively. Briefly, Laszlo uses URLs to retrieve XML data sets
that are bound to visual controls. The relationship between the UI
and the data is lot closer. Data affects the UI much more
substantially in Laszlo. For example, a UI component bound to an
XML node that has siblings will get replicated (if needed).
Conclusion
This introductory article gave you a starting point for
experimenting with Laszlo and starting to explore it. The Laszlo
documentation links in the Resources section of this article are a
good place to start reading more about the language elements. I
also keep
running notes on Laszlo as I experiment with it, and
keep Laszlo sample code on
my weblogging system "akc."
Resources
Satya Komatineni
is the CTO at Indent, Inc. and the author of Aspire, an open source web
development RAD tool for J2EE/XML.
|
