What is "this?"

Here's an OpenLaszlo question that bothered me when I first started, although I have a better feel for how things work now.

In the OpenLaszlo "dashboard" demo, there is a class called music in file musiclib.lzx. The music class has a view called audioviewer; that view has a method playMedia.

Q: When the audioviewer method says this.play(), to what does "this" refer? Is it an instance of music, audioviewer, the canvas in which music is instantiated, or what?

A: I added debug code Debug.write("this is " + this); right after this.play() and ran it; output is: this is $t8 id: audioviewer. So, "this" means audioviewer.

I did not understand what the view tag was doing, initially, or any of the other tags for that matter.

I was thinking in terms of Java. There, you write methods and properties for a class. When you instantiate a class, you do not add things inside it. The only way you can affect the instance that you are creating is by passing arguments to it. (Possibly that is just what you are doing when adding tags inside the canvas tag - I'm still not clear about what really happens there.)

So in Java terms, when I put a view tag inside the canvas tag, it doesn't make sense that I've just declared an instance of a view object (instance of LzView) inside the canvas object. With Laszlo I get the feeling that this is what is happening. Currently, whenever I see a tag like <view> or <canvas>, I associate it with an instance of a class (LzView or LzCanvas). I need to do more reading about this!