OpenLaszlo basic tutorial for a SOLO App

Introduction

The tutorial will show you how to use openlaszlo to generate simple and customizable piece of flash like this one:

So to sum up, a main title, and many links moving smoothly arround, with a good looking fading effect.

Open Laszlo

OpenLaszlo is a great platform for rich applications. By rich applications, understand online app fully integrated into a website, and able to handle complex tasks.

OpenLaszlo usually works as a server: you write your own .lzx files, and when a client requests this file, the server will compile it and send the generated flash to the client. It’s a little bit similar to tomcat and servlets, except that the generated code will run on the client side rather than on the server.

The server mode is great when you own your server, or for local testing, but in the real life, it’s pretty rare to find a shared server with tomcat and openlaszlo installed. (Laszlo being an addon of tomcat).

There is a second mode for laszlo apps: the SOLO mode. And this tutorial will focus on this mode. While the server mode allows a lot more of operations (RPC, streaming…) due to its “connected” nature, the solo mode has the advantage of being easier to deploy. The basic idea being to generate the flash only once, by the programmer, and then to use this generated piece of flash like any other.

In other words, you won’t need to install anything on your server, and the generated flash will be exactly like any other swf.

Getting started

First of all, download the latest openlaszlo version. You should be able to find it here

Then, get yourself a good XML editor. I used Visual Studio, but many others will be fine. You can also download Eclipse and install the Laszlo plugin, but I didn’t find it stable enough when I tried. If you are in hurry, wordpad will be enough.

That’s it. You’re ready to start. I recommend you to take a look at the samples and tutorial provided with the OpenLaszlo installation in order to get a little familiar with the concepts, but it’s not that hard, particularly if you already know any object oriented language.