OpenLaszlo

Yaniv Golan has an interesting post on his blog about the Flex demo he saw at FOWA. His arguement is that he doesn't get how Flex can be useful when it locks people down to a single "platform" (though as he admits, Flash is pretty ubiqutous). He counters with saying that with ASP.NET one could create applications that run the same as Flex apps that publish to XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.

He doesn't mention that in that scenario we're really just swapping a proprietary front-end for a proprietary back-end. ASP.NET servers need IIS (read: Windows). Flex can run on any server and in any browser provided the end-user has Flash (9).

His main point, however, is interesting. What is the benefit of Flex vs. its main look-alike, the open source OpenLaszlo? This is something I've debated with myself and others over and the only major benefits I can see either way are going to come down to end-user target platform and development nicities.

Flex has Flex Builder 2 with a drag-and-drop GUI that can handle just about all of the basic GUI construction and theming that any designer/developer team could need. OpenLaszlo (right now, anyway) doesn't have this that I'm aware of. OpenLaszlo publishes to Flash 7 and now with their Legals release, to DHTML (XHTML, CSS, and Javascript) and they have announced support for Sun Microsystem's Orbit platform, which will let them publish to J2ME (Mobile content anyone?). Flex will publish to Flash 9 and Apollo.

Both are aimed at making web applications. Web applications function completely different than the standard website and in most cases need to defy the web's "page" structure. So if web applications are going to break the functionality of the web browser paradigm anyway, does it matter anymore if they are deployed in Flash or DHTML (AJAX, XHTML+Javascript, what have you)? My gut says no, but in dealing with clients who often demand pixel perfect consistency, it might be easier to deploy in Flash...an environment that has always looked the same cross-browser and cross-platform.