So Close Yet So Far Away

Last year I attended the Startup School held at Stanfurd(sp). I had a good time, heard from a lot of inspirational people, met the founders of some great companies (Reddit, Flickr, Kiko [RIP]). But the information I received wasn't that much different from what I've already heard. Mainly, release early, release often.

The most productive part of the event for me was the lunch. In the lunch line I was able to chat it up with some interesting people. They weren't the big name stars, they were the little guys trying to get their projects off the ground, just like me. And what I find is that those people are the ones who are most on the bleeding edge of technology (see: What's Python?). And in that lunch line I first heard about Laszlo.

Open Laszlo is "used to create web-delivered applications that combine the rich user interface capabilities of desktop client software with the universally accessible, no-download features of web-delivered applications." Basically, it helps you create an interactive Flash UI for your websites. It has common controls like windows, forms, buttons, all in flash. And it's all fairly simple to learn. Within a short amount of time I was able to write a nice little app. And that's with me having no real XML experience beforehand. I was very pleased with it's capabilities.

But what was the problem? One thing I didn't like was the fact that it relies on a server to interact with the client. The idea behind this is that the server creates bytecode that can be interpreted by any type of client. Currently the most popular client is a Flash client, but an AJAX client is also in development. But I don't care about AJAX now. Flash has been doing the same thing AJAX just now is starting to accomplish. And that's coming from someone who doesn't even know Flash and has worked mainly with AJAX.

I wanted the backend of my application to use Rails since ActiveRecord makes database management a piece of cake. But I couldn't just put Rails on the server, and have the Flash frontend on the client. The Laszlo client would have to communicate to the Laszlo server and to the Rails framework. And that's not so simple.

There was a plugin created to integrate Laszlo with Rails. Laszlo on Rails it was called. But I'm always weary of using other people's code. If I run into a problem, its not so trivial to stare at pages of foreign code and discover the bug. Especially for open source projects that contain sparse documentation, if any. And I'm also at mercy of the developers (which, at this point, seem to have given up on the project.)

If only there was a Flash-based UI that could create Rich Internet Applications and reside solely in the client so I could easily use Rails as a backend...

Enter Adobe Flex.