OnJava: Dashboard demo is to Die For
O'Reilly's OnJava.com contains a set of interviews with prominent Java authors and developers about Java in the post-Ruby world. The article is called Ruby the Rival, and it's worth reading.
The article is mostly about the server side, but OpenLaszlo comes up too. OnJava blogger Robert Cooper is quoted as saying:
What irritates me is that in the "applet" space that Java invented, you look at Flash(plus Flex/Laszlo) and it crushes applets in both "cool" (get me to a good user experience quickly) and "powerful" (I get data binding/SOAP/XML-RPC/etc. for free). The fact that the "powerful" side of that isn't in the core JRE immediately kills the usefulness of applets, and if anyone can show me an applet that looks anywhere near as good as the Laszlo Dashboard demo in a similar number of lines of code, I might have a coronary on the spot. "Cool" counts for a lot, too.