Following up on my previous post about Laszlo, I wanted to mention something else that annoys me a lot during development.

In Laszlo you typically develop one monolithic application that is loaded once and communicates with a server in the background. This is very similar to a regular desktop application. However, for development this is a major annoyance since for each change you have to manually go through the whole application and find the functionality that you just changed. This can suck up a lot of time if you like working in an iterative fashion and like to test every small change before moving on.

This is inherent to the whole architectural design and other solutions do not have this.

For example:

• Plain HTML applications
  Just reload the page and you're fine.
  
  
• Ajax applications
  You typically split them up in bookmarkable pages and the time spent going to the changed location after a reload, is much shorter.
  
  
• Swing applications
  This is probably the nicest of them all, you can hot-swap the classes and test out your change immediately.
  
  
• Java applets
  If you run them in the applet viewer, you can use hot-swap as well.
  

I know you can pass query parameters to the Laszlo application and according to that perform certain logic. However, if you want to rely on this to make development more comfortable, you'll have to actually change your application to detect the query parameters and manually develop a way jump to distinct locations. This is still of very limited use though, since you haven't preserved anything of your previous application state. So in most cases you'll just have to build up the state manually anyway.

I'll continue to report on my experience with Laszlo as I progress.

(General note, I'm talking about Laszlo in specific since that's what I'm trying out at the moment, many of the problems are probably going to be experienced with Flex also. However, I'm not evaluating Flex.)