Laszlo was built from the ground up to facilitate the development of data-driven applications. LZX includes a powerful and standard based (XPath) data-binding API, as well as components to facilitate communication with the back-end. XML is used as the standard data representation format.

The <dataset> component is a container for an XML document representing data for the application. Data binding is easy and standard-based: you use the datapath attribute to bind components to tags in XML documents. The syntax used in the datapath attribute to point to a specific tag or tag attribute follows the standard XPath notation.

In OpenLaszlo applications, data binding is declarative and doesn't require script.