Wasting Time with Laszlo

Geert Bevin has a blog entry, titled wasting time with laszlo in which he exclaims some of his frustrations when working with Laszlo Presentation Server.

Laszlo, if your not familiar is an xml based rich application development environment, similar to Macromedia Flex. Laszlo was actually around before Flex, but since Macromedia's release of Flex the product has been open sourced. Both Laszlo and Flex run inside a J2EE servlet container, and generate swf files on the fly.

Geert's main problems are:

• Lack of an IDE - no GUI tools, debugging etc.
• Slow compilation time - Geert cites 30 second compile times on a dual 2.5GHZ G4, that one would annoy me too!
• Bugs - Geert asserts that a product that used to sell for $20k should be rock solid.
• Performance - slow startup times, and optimizers required for decent performance
• Architectural Design - Geert also has issue with the fact that he needed to rewrite client side logic on the server side. Though with the web since you can't always trust your clients, its kind of hard to avoid these issues.

Geert certainly raises some issues that Laszlo developers will need to address, as I think most developers would quickly get frustrated if they have similar experiences. Since Laszlo is now open source I wonder if they have had many new developers? and are they working on these issues?

Back in October I asked What are the differences between Laszlo and Flex, perhaps now that Laszlo has been open for a while, and Flex has been out for a while now might be a better time for people to comment on that.

How does flex compare? Compile time?, IDEs?, bugs?, performance?