I’ve been tinkering around a bit with OpenLaszlo, since here at work I’m about to start writing an RIA for doing online extraction of genealogical records, and it would be really nice not to have to re-invent the wheel. :) The advantages of OpenLaszlo are that it’s free, it compiles to Flash (which is on pretty much every computer out there) and soon DHTML, and it looks like it’s conducive to fast development. And there are a lot of high-profile apps using it (like Pandora).

So I spent half an hour throwing together a quick prototype of our app — no functionality, just the layout — and I think I’m liking it. It’s basically XML with a healthy dose of Javascript. Using XML this way feels almost like Lisp somehow, incidentally. :) So far I haven’t run into any huge roadblocks, so we’ll see if OpenLaszlo works for what I need.

Technorati Tags: OpenLaszlo, Flash, Pandora, XML, Javascript, Lisp

Lately I haven’t been in much of a blogging mood, I’m afraid. Now that I’m done with my midterms, that should change. So, I’m currently reading the CSS specification. I expected it to be boring, the equivalent of walking through a desert, but it’s actually quite interesting. One small thing I’ve already learned is that you can say “font: bold 12pt/14pt monaco” and it will set the leading to 14 points. Cool. (In typography, that’s how we specify it — 10/12 means 10 point text with 12 points of leading.) I’m sure there’s plenty of other stuff I haven’t been aware of, just waiting for me to discover it. It would be nice if they had book versions of the specs… Anyway, there are plenty of other specifications I’m excited to read now (like SVG).

Technorati Tags: CSS, W3C, SVG