Our web framework continues improving, with interesting new features and tons of bug fixes. Let’s take a look to some highlighted 2024r1 changes!
Popovers
Similar to WebDialogs, popovers give you the opportunity to improve your apps’ UX. They are ephemeral screens where you can place text and controls.
Unlike the WebDialog, which is always centered and prevents the user to interact with other controls, Popovers can be placed on specific controls, where that information matters.
Think about them as enhanced “contextual menus” but, instead of just plain text menus, you can add anything you like. Have you ever dreamed of adding a WebMapViewer into some sort of contextual menu? Now you can!
The API is very simple. Create a container, add some controls and that’s it, really. You will just have to create a new instance of that container and show it as a Popover, specifying the control it should be pointing to.
Let’s say you have a container, called “MyTextFieldContainer”, and you want to display it below a WebLabel called “MyLabel”. Here is the code:
Var c As New MyTextFieldContainer
c.ShowPopover(MyLabel)By default, it will be shown below the specified control, but if you want to show it in a different place, you can use the new DisplaySides enumeration. As easy as this:
Var c As New TextFieldContainer
c.ShowPopover(MyLabel, WebContainer.DisplaySides.Top)As you can see, Web Projects’ Popovers are just container instances that you will show dynamically. That gives you the opportunity to raise events, add custom computed properties or implement the Observer interface. If you are already familiar with Containers, you already know how to use Popovers. Learn more about Popovers.
Displaying contextual menus programmatically
Sometimes Popovers could be overkill for the task. If you just want to display a menu with some textual items inside, a contextual menu might be enough.
Imagine you have a WebTextLabel where you want to display the contextual menu whenever the user Presses on it. In its Opening event you could define the ContextualMenu:
Var menu As New WebMenuItem
menu.AddMenuItem("Foo")
menu.AddMenuItem("Bar")
menu.AddMenuItem("Baz")
Me.ContextualMenu = menuImplement the WebLabel.Pressed event and add this code:
Me.ContextualMenu.PopUpAs easy as that.
New RemoveControl method
WebViews controls, like WebPage and WebContainer, now supports removing controls. This gives you the missing piece to create GUIs programmatically, as AddControl was already supported .
This can be useful when you are presenting a form to your end user with an unknown amount of fields.
For example, your user is filling the profile and you want to support having multiple contact fields. Some users will want to add 1 phone, others 2, and others would prefer to be contacted just by email.
Adding and removing controls dynamically gives you the opportunity to build this kind of features. Instead of adding a fixed amount of contact methods, you can adapt your app to what your user really needs.
Performance and memory usage improvements
We’re landing at my favorite part, improvements that nobody will see… unless you want to share your server monitoring stats, which is cool.
2024r1 comes with less Disk I/O usage. In my own benchmarks, Xojo Web is now able to serve about 1200 requests per second via the WebApplication.HandleURL event. That’s around a nice 20% more, compared to the previous version.
Also, thanks to Jeremie Leroy (one of our Xojo MVPs) and Bruno Fréchette, we’ve managed to identify and fix some memory leaks. In 2024r1, your web application will be doing a better job at cleaning up after processing requests.
Bug fixes
The list of fixes is big, you can inspect the whole list in the 2024r1 Release Notes page.
Web fixes by category:
- Compiler: 1
- IDE: 7
- Framework: 40
18 extra regressions were reported and fixed during the beta period. A huge thank you to everyone taking the time to test our releases and reporting issues before the final release becomes available.
Conclusion
We hope you are as excited as we are for this release. I’m personally looking forward to see what you’re building, please remember to mention us on your favorite social network so we all can see what you’re working on.
In the meantime, we are already working hard preparing our next release, 2024r2. Spoilers: You will love it!
Happy coding!
Ricardo has always been curious about how things work. Growing up surrounded by computers he became interested in web technologies in the dial-up connections era. Xojo has been his secret weapon and language of preference since 2018. When he’s not online, chances are he will be scuba diving … or crocheting amigurumis. Find Ricardo on Twitter @piradoiv.