This is not the case always. And WX is an exception by all means. Of course one needs to use it to believe it.
Have you ever tired to build app and generate them for JAVA in WX? The apps generated in WX are light years ahead of all conventional JAVA dev tools in the market.
Just look at the Table/Grid component and Reporting tool. They have features that very few dev tools provide out of the box.
True. There are many tools that are free but that does not mean one can be highly productive using them. I have still to come across modern day development tool (free or paid) that increases developers productivity by multi folds.
The only drawback that I see in WX is that its IDE is available only for Windows so if one is using Linux or MacOS then one if out of luck.
But one can write apps in WX that can run on Windws, Linux & MacOS for desktop, Window Mobile, Android & iOS for Mobile platforms and of course web app that can run on any OS on which WebDev Server can be installed and if one develops web app in PHP mode then the app can run on any shared hosting like GoDaddy, Hostinger, etc.
I tried and I can say: our tools are lightyears ahead. Since we build Java FX, Java Swing, Vaadin and CodenameOne Applications every day we know what our tools can do. Since we have tested WX we know what it can’t do but we need. So I can say: for Java: unusual. There is no need for such “tool” which is none.
Just have a look on the JavaFX Grid and on the JavaFX Table Component and even the Swing Component. There is nothing I can’t provide as functionality out of the box what you provide with WX.
This was my assessment in 2002 when I left the dying XBase world for .NET and it hasn’t changed much. I decided though that if people want me to be half as productive at twice the cost, who am I to complain? And that has proven to be the case, for the most part.
Search for java programmers jobs while they can program vaadin. So simple
And yes, servers in c are existing. But Webapps? Not so many. So try to follow your own lines when arguing. Nobody needs a vaadin programmer. You need a java Programmer. So please
I am still exploring. But yes it is producing DART code and is using Flutter Framework for UI.
Has a very large collection of Widgets out of the box and one can add complex Widgets from pub.dev.
The best part I like about FF is that it generates source code of the app and one can download it or directly send it to Git repo.
This is very rate in a low-code tool!
It has its own share of problems and personally I feel that running the app in Debug is slow as it seems to take about 1-2 minutes to generate code and build the app and run it.
It is really very versatile and allows one to even write own code if one wants to get adventurous.
Precisely. The language is the relatively trivial part. Anyone who is fluent in any C-family language could master Java (the language) in a short time. But it is the frameworks, libraries and ecosystems that take relatively more time. What holds me back from Java is not the language but the plethora of frameworks. If I were already embedded in, say, Swing or Vaadin development, what would hold me back from switching to, say, .NET would be .NET, not C#. Or maybe more exactly not even .NET in general so much as .NET Maui, if it were multi-targeted projects I were concerned with.
And yes in that direction, Vaadin is more mature than Maui, but that is not my point; it is paradigms we get married / committed to, and the language is just a part of that. Arguably even less a part of that in .NET which is language agnostic from the ground up; in theory I could write some or all of the solution in VB.NET or, heck, Eiffel if I wanted to. Yes there are languages other than Java that run on top of the JRE now too. Point being, it’s less about languages and more about frameworks, runtimes and type systems and the like.
Basically tons of code will be similar to a swing app, you only reference to vaadin classes instead of swing classes. That’s indeed impressive. I looked at vaadin roughly 9 months ago, when I had little Java knowledge but rather solid vue,js knowledge.
The way you can easily create web apps in vaadin by just changing a bit of code from your Java Swing desktop apps is impressive.
Again a bit hard to compare it to vuejs (Hilla from Vaadin is more comparable), but what Vaadin Flow achieves if compared to Xojo Web is really good. It is basically a working but better variant of Xojo Web 2. And if you pay them, you will get a Layout Manager which in comparison to Xojo is working seamlessly as well.
There used to be a product, I now forget the name, that would take a VB.NET Winforms app almost without change and make it usable on the web. It was, IIRC, an Israeli company, but it was small and at some point they decided the product was not making them enough money and they wanted to concentrate their resources somewhere else so they discontinued development and support. I messed with it for a time, and it actually reminds me a fair bit of Xojo, it was usable but buggy and they could not seem to plug their leaky abstractions.
For payment you get a visual Designer. The layout managers are open source. I only wanted to mention that.
And the same you have with codenameone for mobile. That’s why I always say: begin with learning swing and have the ability for desktop, mobile and the web.
Can you guys please suggest a book or three for me to read? Not having an understanding of Java, Java Script or Swing etc I need to get a real handle on this.
Thank you all and I appreciate the spirited conversation - am learning a LOT from all of your posts!
My initial enthusiasm for FlutterFlow has all but waned. If people think Xojo has annoying bugs, FlutterFlow is even worse. The most annoying I’ve come across is if you use a customized button and two localizations (I’m doing English and German at the same time), at some point (FlutterFlow decides which point that is) all the button captions of the second language are identical. And there’s no way changing it. If you change the caption of one button, it will change all of them.
