Flash or DHTML... or maybe both.

Trying to write a usable front-end to my Habitual Engine I came to the cruel insight that I totally suck at Javascript and HTML.

I need the front-end to be able to do a lot more than tables, lines, and bulleted lists (which, btw, is hard enough for me in pure HTML), so I need a tool to help me.

Adobe’s Flex looks cool. The SDK and compilers are free, and it has a nice Eclipse-based IDE (USD 250) that I can probably do without. I love the charting component. The produced graphs and charts look awesome, and seems worth the cost of USD 450.

Only problem is it only outputs Flash, and it needs Flash 9 on the client. Ouch. Can I bet the iPhone will run Flash 9? Probably not.

Laszlo System’s OpenLaszlo looks cool. It is completely open source using a Mozilla-like license, and while seemingly quite similar to Flex, it has a major advantage in that it produces both Flash as well as DHMTL! And the flash platform is Flash 7 or higher. That is a winner, clearly!

OpenLaszlo doesn’t have a cool graphing component, but just a few days ago, there was a promising commit to the source trunk and form the look of it, it may be enough for my purposes.

We’ll see…

Comments

[Walt]

Try GWT.

[Hans]

I did, but then I'd have to do javascript via scriptaculous or prototype for nice graphs/charts, and that's exactly what I want to avoid.

Perhaps I missed how you can do those (preferably declaratively) in GWT?