Monday, March 24, 2008

Developing Rich Interactive Applications

We at Quadyne Technologies were comtemplating how to make our product UI elegant, simple to use and yet appealing to the user. The basic need of our product Continuum was to show different windows which contains different aspects of the product like document explorer, task management, notes, search window. But we wanted to keep ourselves away from the standard HTML/DHTML form of screens where there is a menu displayed on the left-hand-side and when the user clicks a menu, the right-hand-side changes. We wanted innovative menu. Something the user can use with ease at the same time giving him a rich experience. No more clicking on menus.. no more drilling down page navigation. Our motto was "Keep It Simple". This is were we found Laszlo useful. The whole UI is rendered in Flash. We now have an intuitive user interface. The user can have multiple windows open so navigation is simply a matter of looking at another window.

Using Laszlo, we now have a easy to use, flash-based interface. There are multiple windows like document explorer window where the user can navigate folders and see his document. There is a task management window where the user can see his pending tasks and create new tasks. There is a search window where the user can search for his documents. There is a notes window where he can scribble notes and these get saved in the system. All these windows are now wonderfully integrated with ease and minimal coding. Laszlo separates the data from the UI. This makes the development and testing quick and easy. The local dataset definition is useful in quickly developing the UI. Also it is very well documented.

Our overall experience with Laszlo has been very good. It has helped us develop our product for managing unstructured information very quickly and efficiently.

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