Flash with OpenLaszlo

RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools like Visual Studio, animation

studios like Macromedia Flash, HTML editors like Macromedia Dreamweaver, all

help in developing a rich user interface. All these IDEs (Integrated Development

Environment) allow us to come up with magnificent interfaces by dragging and

dropping components and controls onto a frame, stage or a window. On the flip

side, changing the user interface of your program developed using these IDE's

would usually mean opening up your program code again in the respective IDEs,

making changes, recompiling and redeploying. Also a programmer will need to

spend significant time in understanding these IDE. 

Considering the above mentioned points, it seems now everyone is shifting

towards markup languages like XML to develop user interfaces-for desktop as well

as for Web. This shift is primarily because of the ease of using a markup to

maintain user interfaces wherein the markup is defined in an external (to the

application) file, which can be changed on the fly without recompiling. 

For example, the new user interface system for Windows Vista called Windows

Presentation Foundation (formerly called Avalon) is based on XAML markup

language. There are packages like SwingML and SwiXml which allow you to generate

Java Swing using XML markup. And for Web there are solutions like OpenLaszlo

which allows us to create Flashy sites using only XML without ever touching the

Macromedia Flash IDE. 

OpenLaszlo, based on Java, is a set of Java Servlets which compiles the user

interface markup defined in XML files to a Flash-based interface. This means,

OpenLaszlo must be deployed on a Java application server. Let us now install and

deploy OpenLaszlo on Tomcat application server running on PCQLinux 2005 (a Linux

distribution given out by PCQuest with the March 2005 issue). Subsequently we

will code simple but flashy applications using it. 

Read the complete tutorial at PCQuest