Martin Polley — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:00:45 GMT

I have often thought that OpenLaszlo would make an excellent alternative to Flash as a prototyping tool, without having to (a) shell out any cash or (b) having to learn ActionScript. In fact, I am in the process of playing around with it now.

But I have not seen any resources online that talk about using it for prototyping.

Has anyone here tried it or considered it? What were your experiences/conclusions?

Martin Polley — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:27:57 GMT

@Jonathan: Thanks for mentioning Spket. I was not aware of it. Looks interesting.

As I see it, the upside of using OpenLaszlo (or Flash, or XHTML+CSS+jQuery, or whatever) is that it allows you to simulate things that you just can’t do in a static, annotated wireframe. And also that you can play around with the interactions and make sure you have covered all the possible flows and ensure they make sense (e.g., what happens if the user cancels here? does it make sense to disable this control when the user makes a selection in a different control? etc.).

The downsides are that (a) it is not visual in the way that Photoshop or Visio are, and (b) it takes quite a lot of time and effort to create a prototype this way.

So the way I see it, if you choose to go down this route (whether it’s Flash, Laszlo, XHTML+whatever), you need to know when it’s necessary and when you can get away with something static. That is, the level of complexity determines whether you go with static or whether you go with dynamic.

Am I on the right track here?

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Martin Polley