Lazslo and Longhorn?
“This is great news for Laszlo! Macromedia has acknowledged that Laszlo's approach to developing rich Internet applications (RIAs) is the way to go! You can't expect large, complex environments to be built with a timeline! That's not what we designed them for!
Timelines are for fine tuned, small experiences, which can then be used for what's known as "user interfaces". But that's only one part of the complex job of building a user experience and that's where Flash's timeline (and Director's as well) both fall flat.
Yes - there are other visual metaphors (like wiring kit 'graphs', iconic languages or flow charts) that can be used for programming, but when it comes down to it - there's nothing like the flow of a text based environment. O-O (object oriented) extensions have improved the state of text based environments, but it's still around typing characters into a text editor - as the 'control' paradigm.
David Temkin, Oliver Steele and the team at Laszlo realized that years ago - and have a development system that's shipping now - based upon that premise. One advantage developers will have in using the Laszlo system, is that all investment they put into the code now, will be leverageable when Microsoft comes up with their new "GUI thing" in Longhorn. Laszlo currently outputs RIAs to the .swf Flash format, but they don't want to "lock" their balls into Macromedia's vice, any more than I want to. So look for future versions of Laszlo to do -what macromedia won;t do. Support more than just the .swf format.
This is - of course - key to any developer. making sure tha their destiny is not locked into ONE scenario - ONE engine. You wanna be able to move your stuff - wherever you want to go - easily. That's what the Laszlo systems provides. A path moving forward.
So now Macromedia announces their version of Laszlo's approach. It's called the Flash MX Professional 2004 and here's what Norm Meyrowitz had to say:
"Flash MX Professional 2004 is a tool designed for top-of-the-line Flash developers or for people used to using forms-based programming metaphors like [Microsoft Corp.'s] Visual Basic or [Borland Software Corp.'s] Delphi," Meyrowitz said.
The only problem is - Norm forgot to credit Laszlo with the idea. I don't mind it when bigger companies that the innvative dieas of young start-uyp.s Just give them credit - for Christ sakes.....“
Update: As David points out, Royale is a completely seperate product (not Flash MX 2004, like Marc suggested). Dave also says Macromedia's Royale plans predate Laszlo, which I wouldn't be suprised about. Using XML to declaratively build flash content is nothing new, we worked on a product that did just this over a year ago. However, Marc's point that Macromedia will never think outside of the Flash player with Royale is most definately correct. So, Laszlo is definately a much cooler product if they are promising support for Longhorn / WinForms as well... maybe that means they will have a .NET Laszlo server ready to go some time too?