I am an experienced dev (41 years) with a soft spot for Basic and thought I’d give Xojo a whirl. I could tell right out the chute it’s only a tool for desktop and console apps – the web stuff is thrashing about with false (re)starts and the mobile stuff is very immature and clunky. But fine – dekstop was my use case so I thought, what the heck. I liked that Xojo has a lot of primitives if you want to do something exotic or to hack for performance. That felt reassuring – at first.
Anyway, desktop and console is my use case, so I built a single window desktop app on MacOS against Postgres, then ported to Windows against Sql Server for a client as a way to get up and running quickly with them. It worked okay, but just okay. Performance wasn’t impressive, controls felt a little immature in places, not quite consistent, couldn’t get it to work with Sql Server without spending $ on a 3rd party driver and THEY couldn’t get it to work with anything but ODBC, I’m guessing because I deployed on Windows Server 2022 and they never test on the server OS. Mercifully it was able to cope with Azure Database when we went to the cloud, at least.
I just spent a couple of weeks porting all that to C# / WinForms and it’s about 3x friskier and everything behaves very consistently and I’d say the WinForms designer, while not perfect, was overall easier to work with once you figure out its quirks.
I consider retiring the Xojo version as retiring technical debt. I can’t be sure that some new release wouldn’t break something and I can be reasonably certain that it won’t improve much if anything as their attention seems to be mostly on mobile and web these days and they don’t seem to much care if things break on the desktop side of things. Also my client uses the MSFT stack and wants everything on .NET 8 and C#.
YMMV … but I don’t think it’s a serious development system for serious developers and I don’t think Geoff thinks so either, he seems to find professionals too demanding.
Threading is complex. People need to learn how to deal with threads. That’s the normal condition. But how can people learn to handle it if there is no chance to try it. Xojo could do that before long time. They by self having no experience with it. Using the excuse that users are not able to handle it is a nice try. But how they know?
There are some troublemakers inside of Xojo which are demonstrating how that works with them. Trying with Web 1 to get the correct Client DateTime is impossible while the function does not what it shall do. Answer of the Support: ask in the Support forum. Done. Answers I got: it works definitely. It does not. It shoes you only the GMT difference. Wow. That helps when you have no Web connection. Good Idea. Good Job. Su user was shooting in his feeds. Bug was filed. Never corrected. Asked Support again: we are not spending Support here, please write to the Support forum.
If Threading will follow this footsteps we will have trouble at the customer side. But, however, the Customer has nothing to do with this. They will say: like we said, Customer get’s in trouble it is too complex.
I was a huge fan of it for a long time too, but trying to create polished apps that can compete is very hard and not something that I could get 'em to put attention on.
The whole “2.0 everything” plan really pissed me off, as it made my life harder for no tangible benefit.
I even wanted to work there, just on the Mac framework, but was told Xojo is exactly as it should be.
Same
Which is just stupid and well require a “2.0 Mobile” in the near future.
golden rule number one for xojo… never ever expect something ready when shipped. in best case its an early alpha. A bunch of versions later you may consider it ready for production.
I was joking… But I am not surprised, Xojo really doesn’t want to admit that “2.0 All The Things” was a bad idea, and is set to make the same mistake over and over again.
“With API 3.0 we’ve now combined DesktopControls and MobileControls in a new class RectControls.”
I like the SwiftUI way, where it’s just Button, List, ScrollView, Canvas etc… If you need Mac only options wrap them into a compiler statement.
Indeed We’ve heard the CEO say things that certainly would lead one to believe the Ostrich algorithm is the way they deal with things
Along the lines of Oh but only one person reported it so it cant be that common
Sure - I know a lot of people that DONT report the same bug if its already been reported
They might not even thumbs up the problem to let Xojo know there are others with that same issue
And so many issues only ever have a single reporter or a single thumbs up
And then we hear Oh but only one person reported it so it cant be that common
And the bug gets ignored
And we get new features that dont work when released
TCP Sockets on Android
Or Timers in the code editor that make it super flakey
That is one of the things I’ve never understood in Xojo’s behaviour.
If 10000 users are affected by a bug, should we really create 10000 reports in Issues to please them? Wouldn’t make much sense…
I think you are wrong. I’m working with this environment for over 20 years and I developed a lot of apps with it. The problems you describe are mostly the result of ignorance, because eveything you describe is included in the standard version of Xojo.
And that last sentence is just complete BS.
You do seem to have the grumpyness towards Xojo to fit in here with this crowd…
Well, this sounds like a fake user with fake statements. A real troll. But maybe Im wrong. Can you backup your words?
But this forum is not higly censored as the xojo one, you can speak freely here BUT the xojo propaganda BS is too obvious.
Anyway, you can back your words and people here can learn and thank you for showing them their error. Just showcase a “Real World” app that uses those “features included in the standard version of Xojo”
There are so many things not really part of the Xojo Standard. Too many things. For many stuffs you need a plugin you have to pay much money for. I guess your Idea is not really the right way. But that’s your business. Many people here are experienced developers which know what it means if a showstopper is there and no way around. And there are many inside. Why should these developers search for alternatives like C#? They should not be in the need of. But they are. Why? I can only speculate about but I guess while the Apps are not really the result they need.
Reading what you write implies: Xojo is a fast, absolutely reliable and stable IDE and compiler. I have to say: sadly it is not. As I a writing Software for all platforms I know what I am speaking about. All Xojo Software I have to test like hell for each platform. And it is sometimes really interesting how stuffs are not running on platforms which are running under macOS without any problem. Why should I rely on that language. On a language where the provided Linux IDE is not even able to load a bigger project from MACOS under Linux? Only one example that the IDE by self is not running correctly on Linux. And that’s not the problem of Linux. It is a problem of the Software itself.
You may believe what you write. But it is that what Xojo writes. Grow up and find out what is going on in real world. Xojo can’t compete with the most professional languages. Not even a bit.
What I am surprised about is that a minority of people here, who ‘no longer use Xojo’, waste half of their waking hours writing novels about how bad Xojo is for them, especially if the complaint is that it ‘wasnt fast enough’ .
If they don’t use it any more, what’s the point?
(Personally, I come here now and then to see if anyone makes a good case for an alternative.
I’m unconvinced by Java, no matter how often that is mentioned .
I struggle with the verbosity of Swift. Somewhat interested by bgrommes experience with Winforms…)
It is possible for someone to face different problems with the tool than you. In the retail market, your product needs to shine to compete, this is a major area that Xojo doesn’t care about at all.
Nearly everything I had to do to make my apps feel like real Mac apps, isn’t included with Xojo and I had to learn Objective-C to be able to understand how to do things and then translate that code into Xojo declares.
But when I raised a list of 40 or more changes to better suit Mac apps for sale, I was shot down, ultimately I was told something along the lines of “Xojo is exactly where it should be”. Lump it or leave.
If Xojo does everything you need it to do out of the box, great, but plenty of others have perfectly valid and negative experiences.
Some things in Swift are very low code, and some function names are a bit longer. The main thing I don’t like is method overloading, I prefer the more verbose factory functions from Objective-C
I would love to be able to do that at this time, but due to bad health, I’m only getting a few hours a day in front of the computer.
Exactly how I feel: there is a LOT of hate towards Xojo and a lot of it is based on wrong expectations. When I started using Xojo (Real Basic) over twenty years ago, there was never any mentioning it being “the best environment in the world to develop software on”. That was never RealBasic’s intention. Their goal was to provide “a rapid development tool to create prototypes on” (if I can quote that correctly). I can remember that statement, because I was thinking: I will be using RealBasic to develop the idea of how my software needs to look and then I will look around for a more serious piece of development software to create the definitive CRM software on. But, the more I worked in RB, the more I was convinced I could create everything I need in that software. I eventually did just that and I did it in an unexpected amount of time: 6 months to learn a new coding language and develop a complete CRM system on it.
Then your expectations are too high or they are not aligning with what Xojo is meant to do. Can you give me an example? Because I can’t begin to understand what you’re talking about. There are a few things Xojo is not meant for: creating games is one of them. Everything that depends on speed can be better done with low level coding. Xojo is perfectly fit for creating administrative software, I have seen people make the most fantastic photo editing software with it, but I doubt one could create a video editing package with it. Comparing Xojo to other development packages is only fair if they have the same target audience. You can’t compare a code writing text editor to MS Word and complain that it doesn’t even have a setting for creating columns or footnotes.
