In a related question, I asked about Web Development. I came across something called OpenLaszlo yesterday and thought it looked interesting for doing some website development. The site has a bunch of good information on it and they've got some nice tutorials and such, but being a total novice (as far as web development goes), I'm wondering whether anyone here would recommend this. As I stated in my other question, this is a new world for me and there are a lot of directions I could go. Can you compare/contrast this and other web development you've done? Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, but I haven't heard much about it on SO and I'm hoping to get some opinions on this.
I worked on a website for about a year in which the entire UI was developed in Laszlo. I've also developed AJAX applications using JS frameworks such as JQuery, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
In my experience, the total effort required is considerably less when using Laszlo, and the class-based object model helps to keep your code better organised than when using JS frameworks. My only complaints about Laszlo were that:
All in all, I thought OpenLaszlo was a pretty good solution for creating rich web-based user interfaces, and has a number of very novel features, e.g. ability to deploy on multiple runtimes (Flash, DHTML, etc.) without requiring any code changes.
Also, I should mention that I haven't used it for almost a year, so it's likely that some progress has been made in recent times on the issues I mentioned above.
5 years since I posted this answer, things have changed considerably. In case anyone is in any doubt, don't use Laszlo, the project is completely moribund.