elliot winard › start of data-driven RIA

I’ve been playing around with Laszlo’s open-source server in my spare time.

I whipped up the beginning of a data-driven RIA piece that consumes an RSS feed from my blog & displays titles of each blog item in a floating window.

I plan on creating RSS-readers using multiple different technologies & compare the length-of-code, ease-of-developent, and development experience with different technologies. After I find time to talk to my landlord about letting me run ethernet cable into the garage, I also hope to set up a new Linux server so I can maintain functional code samples, too.

Here’s the not-yet-fully-functional Laszlo code that I whipped together tonight in a few hours. -

<canvas>
 <dataset name="rss" type="http" src="http://blogger.ihardlyknower.org/index.xml" request="true" />

 <view datapath="rss:/rss/channel">
  <text datapath="title/text()" resize="true"/>
  <text datapath="link/text()" resize="true" />
  <text datapath="description/text()" resize="true" />
  <simplelayout axis="y"/>
 </view>

 <window x="40" y="40" resizable="true" title="rss feed" width="400">
  <view datapath="rss:/rss/channel/item/">
   <view onmouseover="this.setAttribute('bgcolor',0x336699);" onmouseout="this.setAttribute('bgcolor',0xffffff);" stretches="width">
    <text datapath="title/text()" resize="true" />
   </view>
  </view>
  <simplelayout axis="y"/>
 </window>
</canvas>

NOTE: I first used the “autorequest” attribute on the dataset. While the “autorequest” attribute worked, that API is now depreciated in favor of the “request” attribute.