Alternatives to Xojo?

Has anyone got any experience with this https://www.nsbasic.com ?

Isn’t that the one that was called KBasic for a time?

When I was scoping out Alternatives to VB6 for Mac (2006) I looked at everything I could find… and found KBasic to be interesting, but too much difficulty to write/compile (lousy IDE, and if I recall a “manual” compiler)… Now that was 2006… So what may have occured since who knows… but at the time it got a single Star from me.

That all being said… perhaps it was Objective Basic …

I dont honestly know
There was at one time NSBasic which was basic for newtons and it did evolve into basic for portable devices like WinCE device
I’m not sure this isnt that product many years later

Doesnt appear to be signed or notarized

I downloaded it. First observations. It’s downloaded from dropbox. It’s not notarized so you get the “malicious” popup and have to override it.

You beat me to that observation by a few seconds…

Interestingly enough this doesnt look to be aimed primarily at desktop apps but at Web apps

Its got templates to build apps with Cordova & Electron

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Objective Basic has not change since 2012. doesn’t that need xcode ???

That may have been why I dropped it from consideration way back then.

which is somewhat ironic today, since the alternative I’m designing also requires Xcode, but in a somewhat more transparent way

Looks interesting for Web apps. Doesn’t look like it does desktop, but surprisingly it has a drag drop GUI designer, which is very rare for anything that creates web apps!

My experience:

Disclaimer: I’ve only spent playing with it a couple of hours, so some things that I found on the bad side may have workarounds, or ways to avoid them that I do not know as of yet.

Here are my first impressions with AppStudio… Some good and obviously some bad things…

Good:
-IDE is much much faster and responsive than Xojo. Xojo feels like driving a heavy load truck next to AppStudio
-Language is easy. Code can be written in JS OR BASIC (AFAIK). Making a request to my API, getting the results and showing that in a bootstrap datatable (complete with column sorting, search box, and pagination) took me 1 hour. I fell in love at that point.
-It has a graphic designer to place controls on the screen though it’s not 100% WYSIWYG. Most of the controls have to be placed inside containers.
-Lots of modern controls
-Once bought, deployment to anything looks like a one click process
-Lots of sample projects
-Codebase is the same for all targets… No need for #IF Target

Bad:
-IDE is a bit too simple. Lacks advanced features, and debugging is 100% made in the browser (or the device, I guess). Although it has a graphic designer to place controls it has some nagging things like, if you click in a control it will NOT get selected.
-LAME AUTOCOMPLETE!! a product like this simply can not miss this feature. It has syntax highlight, though… thumbs down there. I ketp pressing the Tab key and nothing happened except that the cursor tabbed… horrible. Should be called IN-COMPLETE, rather than auto complete.
-Documentation could be much better.
-Language is kindda poor compared to Xojo. No advanced features at all, no OOP stuff, no delegates, no sign of serial, printers, yeah… well… it’s based on web framework so you can expect that…

Overall… for ME, it might work… as I can not afford a steep learning curve and I only need a solution for web/mobile. The code base is exactly the same, and that’s a plus… because writing once, and creating Android/iOS and WEB at the same time speeds everything up a lot. I am still evaluationg and I will take all the time I want… I have no rush. I the meantime I’ll see where Xojo goes…

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Thanks for the info - very useful !
And welcome to INN !

out of curiosity, does anyone develop with Power Apps?
IT at my workplace are recommending this strongly - but not sure if it’s because Microsoft is their entire world (which it is), of if it’s something worthwhile?

I apologize for my English :frowning:

I have been waiting for Web 2.0 for a long time, as I want to develop an ERP that runs in the browser, but seeing the bad opinion of many Xojo users, I am evaluating other options like Wisej (https://wisej.com/)

Who has tried Wisej? What opinion do you have?

Thank you.

Welcome Gsusled !

Has anyone tried this ?

I don’t find it useful. Converting Android to half baked iOS. For such task, currently, I would prefer Flutter, one code fits all.

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I just got referred to Vaadin.com

As a back end java is really solid and if you can build web apps visually with this tool (like they claim) and have that stable solid scaleable back end it might be a good option for web apps

the first paid tier is about 2x xojo
but if it works well its could well be worth it since java on servers is incredibly stable and has a HUGE pile of libraries & such you can leverage

priced this way its definitely not for tinkerers or hobbyists
maybe thats intentional ?

Indeed. That is why I picked B4J over Xojo for my ABM library for WebApps. The servers have been running for years with tens of thousands of users without a hiccup.