I recently came upon a problem that had a surprisingly pleasant solution. I had set of elements that look like this:

The "Bucket" for each element was a member of a hierarchical (and editable) tree. Usually, people represent a tree like this in SQL using the "adjency list model", where the table is repeatedly joined with itself on ID=parentID to produce the tree. The schema for that table looks like this:

My hierarchy also has order, so that each child of a given parent has a sequential order.

The problem I had was that I wanted to sort my elements in an order based on the order of the tree so that I could have a report that looked like this:

1. Bucket
     Element
     Element
        1.1 Bucket2
             Element
             Element

(more...)

Software developers never have enough time. The code-slingers on the Laszlo Studios team are no different: we have many different projects running at any given time and strive to deliver perfect code on time scales of six weeks to three months. How do we do it? A little luck and a lot of laziness:

Create minimal structure and get going
On projects with tight deadlines, being able to find a relevant chunk of code and either fix it or extend it is more important than dealing with beautifully designed and over-engineered interfaces. Studios projects start with the creation of a few directories and main.lzx. Here's the listing from our latest completed project:

(more...)

The OpenLaszlo project's very own Max Carlson, together with Ben Cerveny, have created the awesome State Machine, a tool for visualizing the influence of money on politics.

Matt Raible will be presenting "Developing Web Applications with Spring and Laszlo. Matt is the author of "Spring Live":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974884375 and a co-author of "Pro JSP":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590592255.

!>http://www.thespringexperience.com/bio/45_Raible_medium.jpg!

The "Interface21":http://www.springframework.com/ and "NoFluffJustStuff":http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/ Java Symposiums have announced "The Spring Experience":http://www.thespringexperience.com/, the first ever conference exclusively for the Spring Framework community. This international event will take place December 7th - 10th, 2005 at the Sheraton Bal Harbour Beach Resort in South Florida.

Max Carlson has posted a database API spec to the OpenLaszlo development mailing list:

The notion is to have a common REST API for Laszlo to read form and communicate changes to remote data sources. The plan is to create a special Laszlo dataset that knows how to speak this protocol and can automatically sync with the back-end. The first implementation will likely be in PHP and support SQL databases such as MySQL. Later implementations could be built on other platforms - I'd love to see one built on Rails. It's important to note that the protocol is designed to be general enough to work with any data source that has sets of records - it's not necessarily tied to SQL databases. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

Bruce Eckel is asking about OpenLaszlo. There's a lively discussion there – join the conversation!

New York Magazine praises BlaBlaList, an Openlaszlo application developed by Geert Bevin, the creator of Rife:

There are other competing to-do list services on the Internet, but Bla-bla List has by far the most elegant design and coolest functionality...

Spket IDE is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo built on top of Eclipse RCP(Rich Client Platform).

It is small and easy to install, with syntax highlighting, code
completion for XML and JavaScript.

Screenshots: http://www.spket.com/screenshots.html
Download: http://www.spket.com/download.html