After developing seriously with Objo for a while, I’ve reached a simple conclusion:
Moving from Xojo to Objo was the right decision for me.
What attracts me most isn’t a single feature. It’s the whole development experience.
Objo is fast and responsive, the language is clean and approachable, and most importantly, I enjoy programming with it.
I’ve also had the unusual opportunity to use Objo while it is developing rapidly. I report bugs and limitations to Garry, we discuss ideas, problems get investigated, and improvements regularly appear in new releases. I don’t feel like a customer standing outside looking in. I feel involved in the development of something with enormous potential.
That doesn’t mean Objo is finished. It is young, and Xojo naturally still has capabilities that Objo doesn’t. But Objo’s speed of development and Garry’s responsiveness give me considerable confidence in where it is going.
So why did I originally start looking beyond Xojo?
It wasn’t one thing. Xojo had become buggy and painfully slow for me, even hard-crashing when opening the IDE. API 2.0 broke existing code without providing the migration path I expected from such a fundamental change. The Lite licence disappeared, while the remaining entry price became unjustifiable for me. And the increasingly restrictive moderation of Xojo’s forum didn’t help.
Eventually those things pushed me to look elsewhere.
Objo is what made me happy that I did.
I’m not claiming that every Xojo developer should immediately switch to Objo. But if you enjoy the kind of approachable RAD development that attracted many of us to Xojo in the first place, I strongly recommend giving Objo a serious try.
Don’t just look at the feature list.
Build something with it.
That’s what convinced me.
Objo started for me as an interesting experiment. Today it has become my development environment of choice — and judging by the pace at which it is evolving, I think its future is going to be very interesting indeed.
A happy Objo developer