A lot of people have been asking me lately how Laszlo compares to Ruby on Rails. RoR has done an excellent job of catching the Ajax wave, even though most of the renowned Ajax examples are written in Java and C. In spirit, Rails and Laszlo are kin: both fashion themselves as lightweight, novel ways to quickly create web-based applications. Both are kinds of responses to the options of heavier-weight Java on the one side, and the wild-west of PHP and Perl on the other.

Every once in a while I am forced to contend with the Java programming language, and I almost always end up disgusted and disappointed as a result. My experience with Java is usually that it takes 5 lines or so of code to express a single idea.

I generally line up on the "Worse is Better" side of things, so it's rare that I'm critical of development tools that appear to be working. As Laszlo has dived into its DHTML port, though, we've been looking at the existing open-source frameworks -- especially at their class models -- to see if there's a standard we can follow, or even a useful bit of code to pick up. I've been a bit disappointed in the way that the various Ajax frameworks treat fundamental object model of the Javascript client that's running in the browser.

A lot of people have been speculating lately that Microsoft may be eclipsed by Google. I'm sympathetic to that view, and I do think that Google poses a threat, but there's a dark horse in this race: Apple Computer Inc., which has quietly put together quite a run for itself.

Laszlo has a bunch of nifty databinding features. A lot of them are fairly high-level and quite powerful, but I've noticed (and experienced) that there are a lot of cases that they don't quite cover. It's been interesting to be involved in designing APIs and then to see how they are used in the wild. Well designed parts of the API not only flourish -- they become support for increasing levels of elegant and useful abstraction.

I recently switched email programs. I had been using Thunderbird, pretty much for a single feature: its client-side Bayesian spam filtering. Now that Laszlo is using a new mail server and we're off of god-awful Exchange, I can run spamassassin against my IMAP account. Spamassassin is awesome, but even better is my new mail client: Pine.

you dive past the still reflective surface of the monitor to that cool, vast world underneath. don't stop falter or pause to run it just hammer the keys. imagine yourself beheaded at the hands of your enemy but your fingers keep moving. your head topples and rolls on the floor but your work doesn't stop; you already moved inside.

After my last post, I started thinking about how often I've run into a situation where the notion of "groups" complicates what would otherwise be a simple process. The classic situation is is that the user wants to perform an action on an element, but that action is group-associative, not element-associative. So, in order for the user to do what she wants to do, she has to stop mid-process and create a new group.

I found this reaction to Laszlo interesting.

This is clearly a reasonably nuanced criticism, and I'm always
interested to hear about what people make of the work we've done. If
you've read the post, then you probably know that this fellow didn't
think much of it, and that there are at least a few others out there
who agree with him.