OpenLazslo DrupalCon Boston Session notes

First half of OpenLaszlo and Jquery session:

boston2008.drupalcon

LSZ code

can get XML out of Drupal pretty easily
1. write a custom query
2. phptemplate
3. Views
(both grand hacks, but really useful)
4. services

Useful for more than Laszlo

PHPTemplate method

if ($node->type == 'xml' && $_GET['xml'] == 'true') {

exit;
}

You need to know about exit for XML.

You can't return anything.

Views method

Views is way more flexible

requires custom theming of views

Services

Not as simple as views or phptemplate.
Potentially offers more options.
Necessary if you want to communicate back to Drupal from the display.

Gracefully degrading website.

Flash, dhtml, images, text -- return what the browser can handle.

There are a lot of people who can do flash, and a lot who can do text and images, but not many can do dhtml that works just like Flash.

OpenLaszlo makes it really easy to do both at once.

We could be the first community to take a big step that way.

I'm the design guy who got into development.

Drupal has JQuery right away.
I can't guarantee you won't have conflicts with OpenLaszlo, but it does do namespacing really well to avoid conflicts.

No, it can't always look exactly like Flash, but normally you won't notice any difference.

The Worx Company

THe photoflow flash plugin

All i did was create a custom content type

change the CCK field to do not display
and it's out of my Flash.

I'm using a view to generate the XML (based on "whether to display in lash or not" field)
just like any view

The Flex presentation yesterday, is OpenLaszlo timeline based or not,

OpenLaszlo
They're a .org with a .com behind them.
Both their web sites are Drupal web sites

a number of people employed by Macromedia/Adobe
they built their own company, Lazslo Systems

Object-oriented XML

Once you build the object, you can use it in different contexts.

It's not timeline based at all, there's not an IDE, you use any texteditor you like.

Libraries available?
they publish a lot of the ones they create:
Flickr app

Not dependent on your flash developer for changing what is displayed

Because it's a component, we bought the component-- it's not developed in openlazslo. No DHTML version.

Is coding animation a pain? Not as much as you'd think?

Open source library called SWIFF Address which gives you bookmarks and deeplinks for Flash and Flex. Discussing what to get it to work for OpenLaszlo. It just works with a SWIFF file, so it'll work out of the box for Lazslo-produced Flash.

Resolution