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.

I have to admit that I'm sympathetic to many of the points that the
post makes. They're valid, and no one is more aware of the
shortcomings of the product than those of us who are closest to it.
That said, I can't help but argue the opposite side :)

The post makes two main points about Laszlo. The first is that
Laszlo has bugs and missing features. The second is that the
architecture of a Laszlo app is different from that of a
conventional server-side application.

The first point must be conceded. There are a lot of bugs in Laszlo.
That said, there are a lot of bugs and missing features in other
software that's become very popular. Laszlo is a fairly complicated
system -- think of it like an OS for web-based applications. As
such, I think it's surprisingly correct and complete. The post
evaluates the 2.x version of Laszlo's product, and some of the
issues mentioned are actually addressed by Laszlo 3.x. That said,
doesn't everyone remember how horrible it was to code for Windows
3.0? Still, it provided utility and allowed developers to create
graphical user interfaces more quickly, and it caught on despite
some of the glaring problems with its APIs and component set.

So sure, some higher level concepts such as complex drag/drop
management and data transaction rollback are not built into
the platform or the core component set. What makes Laszlo
interesting to me is that it's so easy to write this stuff. When my
group, Laszlo Studios, starts a new development
project, we often begin with objects that provide this kind of
functionality. What's cool is that they're so simple that we
can quickly build and customize these pieces for each individual
solution.

The other thing that's cool is that the product is
open source. People can write these things and contribute them
back to the community. Our hope is that passionate and slightly
irritated people like this poster will just go out fix some of the
bugs and create some of the missing features. There's a lot
of work to do, and we're expecting that there are a lot of people
out there who want to help
us do it.

As for the second point, that extra work must done to implement some
features on both the server and the client for a Laszlo app, I think
that there is limited truth to this assertion. The fact is that we develop most of our Laszlo applications in less time than it takes to do a similar Java/DHTML app. I have seen that developers run into problems when they don't fully make the switch to thinking about the client as a fully formed MVC environment, and of the server only as a data and business logic access layer.

I can see how people may have gotten the wrong impression. This
article about a different architecture for Laszlo apps contains
some scary looking architecture diagrams. I have tried to show that
in practice the backends
for these apps are fairly simple. I also think that the growing
consensus on XML-REST being the best way to provide these
backends supports this simple model of client/server development.

I'm sure that some people will be deterred by cricism like this. My
hope is that a lot of other people will be inspired by all of the
opportunites there are to evolve the only free, open platform for
next generation web applications.