I’ve been meaning to learn more about XAML and was interested to see a very approachable app demonstrated in a tutorial by Joe Marini (via Sam Wan).
Since I left my msdn subscription at the office, I decided to write the app in LZX (from Laszlo Systems) to see how the two compare.
The Laszlo app is 39 lines of code, while the XAML version is 70. While I don’t believe that brevity is all important, I do think it helps.
Independent of the academic interest in the comparison of the two languages. The Laszlo app will, of course, run in your browser today without the need to install extra software or wait for an OS upgrade.
I read about Laszlo in Marc Canter’s blog, and then eventually found your blog – it might be in his blogroll.
Anyway, isn’t Laszlo just a scripting language with resources that have been serialized into an XML stream?
In that way it’s not much different than a VisualBasic or Java application except it is running in the Flash sandbox.
Clearly the widespread runtime of Flash is advantageous. But the part about XML, what do we gain from that?
Am I missing something? I wanted to give it a spin, but it seems like the developer package is about $7k.
Take a look at XUL (XML User Interface Language). XUL has been around a long time and some very successful applications have been written with it. Oh, it’s free. http://www.xulplanet.org is my favorite xul reference.
Kiyooka-san – Laszlo is a free, open-source project. LZX, Laszlo’s language, is a XML with ECMAScript scripting. The XML for declarative programming of objects, animations, stateful behaviors & the ECMAScript (or JavaScript) for more fine-grained control of the app’s behavior.
You can download a copy of the lps for free at <a http://www.laszlosystems.com/developers/