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I’ve been playing with OpenLaszlo and my general impression of it is good. It’s very easy to use and you can build quick, rich, applications in no time, with all the fancy-ness of Ajax and Flash. But, it’s not for me…yet.
I’m not a big Flash guy. Using Flash on some elements of *a* page is fine, but entire sites on Flash is overwhelming and isn’t friendly for SEO or others trying to link to the site; in general, Flash has some usability issues.
I built a simple application that uses the Flickr API and does a search on Flickr from within my application — with draggable elements and everything. It was easy to do and the presentation was elegant and attractive. But, the Ruby on Rails site has the same tutorial — so, I think it’s a common one among web frameworks. Nevertheless, it took about 5 minutes and it was really nice. Something like that in raw PHP, PERL, or even Python would’ve taken me much longer to do.
But, it was in Flash. OpenLaszlo claims to output to DHTML later this year; perhaps I’ll revisit it then.
In the meantime, I thought about Django for Python, since I already do Python; but, the support for Django doesn’t seem to be where it needs to be yet — there doesn’t seem to be much of a community around it.
So, I’ve decided to play on the Rails framework. I’ve been learning Ruby, so I’ll just extend that learning to Rails. I’m excited and have some interesting ideas bouncing in my head that can be implemented in RoR. We’ll see.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey there,
Are you sure you’re talking about Django, the Python Web framework? Its community is *fantastic* — very friendly and helpful. In fact, it’s probably the best thing about the project! I’d urge you to take another look.
Adrian (a Django guy)
Django is pretty cool.. and is rails.
From last count it has over 2000 people subscribed to it’s mailing lists, and some big sites running it see http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoPoweredSites
If you already know python, I’d have a look.
(another django guy who reads your blog)
As a python user who has done some basic Django apps, I rate the community as pretty good. They even fixed one of my bugs. If you are leaving django wholey on account of the community, perhaps you should reconsider.
If you are interested in rails, but like python you might like pylons ( http://pylonshq.com/ ). It has many rails-esque features. It also has an arguably better ORM than django (or rails). It’s a little more nascent than django and doesn’t receive nearly as much buzz as it should. The community there is also very helpful. I would call it TurboGears++, since it seems to have already incorporated many of the things that TG is moving towards.
* Disclaimer. I’m not a developer for either of these two frameworks, but a satisfied user.
@Adrian & @Ian:
No, I’m not rejecting Django — not at all. I dig Python. In fact, last night I built the Poll Application in Django as part of the tutorial. It wasn’t difficult at all. I’m just trying out a bunch of stuff and I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby. OpenLaszlo is not for me right now, but I dig Python, for sure. I’ll play more with Django with the Dojo Toolkit to see if I can build what I have in my mind. Thanks for reading.
Pete
i’ve used dev platforms on everything you can imagine since 1984…yes 1984 and i am just 100% stunned that people can think Python/OpenLaszlo or anything remotely opensourcy is efective and productive. I have used Python to create complex task such as data transformation of millions of records between legacy systems and new ones and it sucks, i abandoned using it all together. I’ve moved over to using tools that enabled me to do the same taks in 5 days perfectly. Why do some people persist to live and work in tents when there are room in scyscrapers?
I completely agree. Opensource is so dead.