News

IBM’s IDE for Laszlo Available

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• May 9, 2005

IBM’s alphaWorks updated its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo, a technology preview of an Eclipse-based development environment for creating, editing, debugging and testing applications based on the LZX declarative mark-up language.

Laszlo is based on LZX, which is an XML and JavaScript description language similar to XML User Interface Language and XAML, Microsoft’s Longhorn mark-up language. The Laszlo platform is an open-source platform for developing and delivering rich Internet applications; LZX XML mark-up is used to create these user interfaces.

The platform is part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit, a collection of emerging technologies from IBM’s software development and research labs.

The IDE includes a set of plug-ins that would create and test Laszlo applications, all within the Eclipse platform. These applications are then deployed and run on a Web server. IDE for Laszlo 2.0 also features an editing environment for the LZX mark-up language. Its editing capabilities include XML and script-based content assistance, XML syntax highlighting and XML code formatting.

Through IDE for Laszlo, developers would be able to preview the new application without deployment within the Eclipse environment. It supports markers for reflecting compilation and syntactical errors. After development is completed, these new applications can then be deployed and run.

Version 2.0’s visual editor also features a set of views: palette, properties and outline. Using the palette view, developers would be able to drag and drop new LZX elements into the editor. Developers would use the properties view to edit the attributes of a selected LZX element. The outline view presents the LZX document as a tree, allowing developers to make changes to a document’s structure.

Variables that can be inspected at run time, and object properties that can be altered are new debugging capabilities of IDE for Laszlo. Script expressions that can be evaluated, and debugging output available in a console window are the other new debugging capabilities.