Is there a point where we get to say "We told you so"?

Xojo
21

Oh undoubtedly
But this shift started many years ago and seems to have accelerated in recent years

I believe Bob even left the consulting biz 7+ years ago because of it and has now worked a full time job ever since
I know others that have been similarly affected

Except when it doesn’t because they’re all hosted in the USA and your requirements are that it be hosted in country (I say that only because the place I’m working at right now is having exactly that discussion with the local municipality)
Trying to find such a set up is surprisingly difficult - but dead easy IF we are ok with hosting on US based servers

22

True, that is an issue that persists with many providers, but others like Xano (or even Xojo Cloud), allow you select your server location based on your data compliance commitments.

We’ve also had requirements that enforce geofencing and other measures to prevent users from accessing systems / data when not present in the country.

Kind regards, Andrew

23

Oh absolutely there are some options
Just when you select a SaaS set up that DOESNT have those options .. ick !
Exactly the case we have where the SaaS provider ONLY hosts in the US, UK and a few others and has NO topic for Canada
So now we’re in a bit of a pickle :man_shrugging:

24

Oh man. It can’t be seven years. Crap. That seems like a lifetime ago.

The downfall of Xojo was starting to happen long before the rise of AI coding assist. There were much bigger developer ecosystems that came to market that did a competent job at cross platform desktop applications which was Xojo’s (and my consulting) bread and butter.

Some of those tools also did mobile apps and I think Xojo gleaned the wrong insight from them. The inclusion of mobile in Xojo took valuable resources away from their strength. I’m also still not convinced that Xojo’s web applications are helpful either since it’s so very different from the rest of the web community. And add in the Web version 1 to version 2 fiasco… Also web took resources away from their core strength.

Now, add in the (sometimes/usually) very good AI coding tools and Xojo looks more like a liability than an asset. The AI often gets Xojo wrong because it doesn’t have the data to train properly (and again API 1 vs API 2 and confusion with VB6). So from a user perspective why the heck would you use Xojo? There are more negatives than positives.

The few times I’ve had to fire up Xojo recently just prove to me what a disaster it’s become. The IDE is SO bad. It’s slow, it’s limited, and doesn’t do half the things that most IDE’s do. Add in the tiny ecosystem and I can see why developers grow out of it quickly, or decide not to get into it in the first place.

Just for kicks I attended one of Geoff’s webinars a month or so ago. It was bad. There was nothing in the webinar that gave me any hope for the future of Xojo. Even Geoff didn’t sound excited (granted they had some technical issues before it started so take that with a grain of salt). But for a major release he didn’t give me the reason to update to it. Sort of felt like he was just going through the motions.

So yeah, many of the things we warned them about have come to pass. I’ve said they’re 5 years away from going under for about 10 years now so my estimate was wrong but does anyone really see Xojo standing in 5 years? You can only hemorrhage customers and income for so long.

25

In a way I’d expect them to still be around but certainly not growing
From what I’ve been told they’ve gone through rough patches before esp around the shift from the C based IDE to the RB written one in 2005/6 or so
So I expect they’ll do the same & soldier one

But as you noted their sales can’t have just flat lined - they have to have declined quite a bit from the last days I was there
Outward appearances being what they are that would be my guess

26

I always thought their focus on the ‘citizen developer’ instead of Pro/Business segment was dumb because the Pro/Business segment will literally give them money for features/stability. But then they sucker punched all of the citizen developers by eliminating the cheaper licenses. So…where do they go from here? Seems like they’ve burned all their bridges.

To gain more customers, or bring back old ones, they have to rebuild trust. The people on this forum will be hard sells because they not only broke our trust but in many cases stomped on it and ground it into the dirt. If I was rebuilding the customer base this is the group that I’d reach out to. But then again, many of us have tried reaching out, for years, in various ways, to try to help out. WTF do we know? We’re just (former) customers.

27

I asked ChatGPT if I would create Bala Bala books (an bookkeeping/accounting application) in Xojo. This is what it said:

Should I use Xojo for Bala Bala books?

No, Chris—I would not use Xojo for Bala Bala Books. I would keep it in PureBasic.

Bala Bala Books is not an experimental utility. It will hold financial records for your Botswana business and may eventually include bookkeeping, VAT, inventory, assets, backups and reporting. You want it to remain dependable for perhaps 10–20 years. That changes everything.

Why PureBasic remains the better choice

  • It produces small, fast native executables with few dependencies.
  • You retain tight control over the database, files, backups and installation.
  • Its development direction has been comparatively conservative.
  • Your existing modular architecture already fits PureBasic well.
  • You are not dependent on Xojo’s licence structure merely to continue building the program.
  • You avoid migrating code you have already designed and partially developed.

Your planned safeguards—strict journal posting, correction journals instead of silent back-editing, general-ledger validation, administrative locking and permanent HTML/CSS logs—need predictable behaviour above all else. PureBasic may require more manual work on the interface, but that work remains under your control.

Why I would not choose Xojo here

Xojo would make some parts quicker:

  • designing windows;
  • creating controls;
  • database-driven forms;
  • printing and reports;
  • producing a polished interface.

But those conveniences come with strategic dependency. Xojo’s entry pricing and product positioning have changed substantially, Lite has disappeared, and the entire compiler, framework and IDE remain controlled by one relatively small private company. That is an unnecessary additional risk for accounting software.

The danger is not that Xojo will suddenly disappear tomorrow. The danger is that five years from now Bala Bala Books depends on a particular Xojo release because a newer framework introduces incompatibilities—or that you must renew an expensive licence merely to support a new Windows version.

My recommendation

Use:

  • PureBasic for Bala Bala Books itself
  • SQLite for the accounting database
  • HTML/CSS for logs, reports and printable records
  • strictly separated modules for ledger, journals, VAT, inventory, assets, logging, backups and settings

Xojo could still be useful for disposable internal tools or rapid prototypes. I would not place the financial heart of your business inside it.

You originally rejected Xojo for Bala Bala Books because you wanted lean deployment, control, reliability and long-term independence. After analysing Xojo more closely, I think that original decision was correct. Xojo is tempting because the road looks smoother; PureBasic is safer because you own more of the road.

I think that says enough about Xojo.

28

Obviously you had a previous discussion with ChatGPT about this and since its job is to affirm the direction you’re currently going, I hardly find it’s synopsis the “final nail in the coffin” you’re making it out to be. I’m not saying that xojo’s the right tool for your project, only that asking ChatGPT for an opinion now is going to get back the exact biases that you put in earlier.

29

Well we all might be wrong. In an unexpected move Geoff will surprise us all announcing buying Objo :wink:

30

Let’s hope not! Objo is in good hands with Garry and seems to be improving at a remarkable pace. Geoff is welcome to watch its progress from the sidelines. :wink:

33

Does Xojo have an integrated AI assistant? Objo does, and I have set up a local LLM (Qwen 3.8 27B, the version optimized for Apple hardware, via Ollama). So far, I’m very impressed, and I’m about the furthest thing possible from an LLM fanboy.

Objo would be even less generally known at this point than Xojo, but the AI assistant comes extensively pre-prompted for Objo and with privileged access to Objo docs, which are also currently undergoing refactoring to be more LLM-friendly. It’s read-only by default with access to Objo Studio’s internal automation API and support for various web search clients. A carefully designed external MCP API with appropriate guardrails (off by default) will shortly be exposed.

So far, Objo’s AI Assistant seems to me to be another example of how adding sufficient context and structure are crucial to good results with LLMs. So far I have asked it fairly obscure questions about the Objo language – and it has yet to make up incorrect answers. So it can be done.

I have not yet seen a need for it to write code on my behalf but might warm to it for prototypes and unit tests and the like.

Somehow the Objo integration is not the turn-off for me that, e.g., Copilot is in Visual Studio. Partly because it’s not being foisted on me, and partly because it’s not 180 degrees wrong half the time. I mean the stuff Copilot wants to suggest for a code block is all to often hilariously off-base. This is actually useful.

35

Xojo has Jade but not sure I’d count it at the same level as what’s available in some other tools

36

Isn’t it just a way to talk to other’s AI ?

37

Yes, it’s just a chat window. They’re so proud of what you could do much more successfully in a web browser and it’s sad.

I know when and how long that development cycle was based on issue tracker activity. They should not be pleased with how long it took them to implement a JSON REST API or the quality of work.

I believe it’s still mangling responses, but when I went to go get receipts the issue tracker has been updated to be less useful… again.

38

Do you know if Xojo actually has an MCP that an agent could talk to and get info about your project?

39

From Xojo’s own documentation, it is a chat with manual copy-paste action of AI code snippets into the Xojo code editor.

40

I read a bug report about Jade (before the first release) and then, in the Forum I just use that word: I get a bad mail saying I cannot talk to confidential information (that I do not have since around 13 years ago…

It was not the first time (I get a mail because I wrote something here about Xojo, another public information I do not have the right to disclose…)

Very sad.