A recent SD Times article mentioned a study on how developers who use traditional 3rd generation languages (3GL) view 4GL (these days referred to as low-code) tools/languages. The article sums it up by saying:
“Developers adopting low-code platforms want dramatically higher productivity without sacrificing features that allow them to get under the hood if the application they’re building calls for it.”
That’s an understandable concern. Developers want the productivity they can get from low-code tools but they don’t want to give up the ability to call directly into the operating system when they need to. There are low-code platforms that don’t provide such access. Fortunately, Xojo isn’t amongst them. Our vision for Xojo has always been to make the tool easy to learn and highly productive to develop applications with, without sacrificing power when you need it.
In those rare cases when you need to use an OS capability for which the Xojo framework does not provide built-in support, there are three different ways to do so:
- The Shell – Xojo’s Shell class makes it easy to issue OS commands and get back results.
- Plugins – These are libraries (usually written in C or C++) that can include OS SDK calls.
- Declares – These allow the developer to call individual OS calls from their code.
If you’re a developer using a traditional 3GL language and want to get the productivity benefit of low-code tools, take a look at Xojo as it gives you that without sacrificing low-level OS access.