Honestly, I have no idea who Xojo markets to. I’ve used the term hobbyist in the past but Xojo prefers the term ‘Citizen Developer’. Whatever. I think we’re talking about the same crowd. They’re people that aren’t necessarily getting paid to develop software or it’s not their primary function in their job. While, I don’t have a problem with getting more of these types of people into the community but what I really want are the enterprise users. Yet, the stigma of Basic still persists. I think in many cases it’s because Basic is very approachable for new developers. Many of these developers are not programmers by education and are coming at the language to get something done. If you’re trying to introduce Xojo to your corporate IT department filled with programmers, that have spent thousands of dollars on their eduction, Xojo doesn’t fit any of the checkboxes of any of the current, hot, and yet soon-to-be-obsolete development tools they’ve learned.įrom my own personal experience we had a Xojo app working as a prototype, proof-of-concept application, for a big Fortune 100 company. Their IT department laughed at it and then turned around and told the project owner that it would take them TWO YEARS to start working it (they were busy after all) and they estimated another two years of development time. Um…with Xojo our small five person team spent under a year on it starting from scratch and got it mostly working! But that didn’t matter. Never underestimate the power of entrenched IT departments.Īnd, much like in the Visual Basic 6 era, just because you can create a very useful application with the tool doesn’t mean that it is a great application that adheres to all of the modern principles. Simply put, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean anybody can magically create a great application. Software development takes some skill and some discipline to make a good application and sometimes beginning programmers don’t know any better (regardless of platform). The first issue is the BASIC language. Xojo uses a form of the basic language. However, it’s nothing like the gwbasic many programmers learned in high school. It is a highly evolved, object-oriented language that happens to use a form of basic as the syntax. Unlike other forms of basic, Xojo compiles down into a self contained executable needing no outside libraries. It is not an interpreted language. It’s not a ‘toy’ language. We also have a YouTube video that walks you through the creation of the above example.In Part 1 of Xojo: The Best Secret in the Programming Industry we talked about some of the capabilities of Xojo and why it’s such a great software development tool. We finished it with the question on why isn’t Xojo more well known? If it’s such a good development tool why doesn’t everyone know about it? There are no easy answers to this but I’ll identify some of areas of concern. Xojo includes an example project with code to connect to a MySQL database, create a table and add data to it: Database/MySQL/MySQLExample.
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