In a previous entry we started to dig into web services with Xojo. The first post focused on the backend (server side), creating the Xojo app acting as middleware between the clients and the database that holds your data. We are using SQLite as the backend engine but it would not be difficult to change to other supported database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL (MariaDB), Oracle or SQL Server, and even ODBC; all of these are supported by Xojo!
Comments closedAuthor: Javier Menendez
The WebCanvas control is used for drawing graphics in web apps. It takes advantage of the HTML5 Canvas making it fast and powerful. Sometimes is can be useful to be able to save the graphics drawn in the WebCanvas to an image file, but unfortunately there is no built-in Xojo method to do this.
However, by using a little JavaScript you can easily add this capability to Xojo.
Comments closed
Using Xojo Web to create complete web apps and solutions means not having to learn a bunch of interpreted languages and dozens of ever-changing frameworks. I’m looking at you: HTML, CSS (is that even a language?), JavaScript, PHP, et al. Of course, Xojo Web not only makes it possible to create your own web apps, but it also acts as the perfect middleware that your desktop and iOS apps can communicate with. Learn about APIs and web services with Xojo in the tutorial blog post.
Comments closedFollow this tutorial to learn how to create active (clickable) words in a text of a TextArea control using the OOP Delegate design pattern, which allows you to dynamically change how your app will react when the user clicks on any of these active words. Best of all, this is cross-platform, so you can use it for macOS, Windows and Linux deployments!
Comments closedIn an ideal world there is a person responsible for every step in software development, from coding, UI design, distribution, documentation, marketing and support. All of this can seem really overwhelming for independent developers and small businesses. But if you break it down and take it one piece at a time, it’s manageable by even the smallest team of one. Right now, let’s look at software distribution.
For software, distribution usually means generating and validating unique serial numbers for each of your products and users. Serial numbers (or license keys) help you manage your users, unlock a free trial or demo version for full use and, of course, minimize illegal use of your apps.
Comments closedXojo is an Object Oriented Programming Language and, among other things, that means that it supports Methods Overloading. We have seen in other posts that some of these overloaded methods can be Class Constructors, but, there are others things you can do. For example, we can overload the operators. These are the methods in charge of adding two instances of the same class, subtracting, multiplying or dividing them. But we also have at our disposal another operator we can overload: Lookup. What advantages does this give us and how it does it work? Let’s explore it while building a Preferences class we can use in any of our projects.
Comments closedIn many of our development projects, if not all, we are confronted with situations when we need to test our classes before the final deployment of a project. I’m not talking about Unit Testing here, though I highly recommend the excellent session on that topic from XDC 2018.
For example, it would not be desirable to send hundreds of emails to all the entries in a database simply to test one of the workflow steps or to verify that emails are being delivered as expected. It would be a lot simpler, and less disruptive to those using your app, to test using a few email addresses that are under your control.
So let’s establish a mechanism that allows us tell our apps when to run in a “simulated” mode vs. a “real” mode for all or some of the components that we need to test along the development cycle.
Comments closedWhether you are using Xojo to create your very first application or if you are coming from other languages, like C# or VisualBasic, customized UI controls are probably one of those things you have in your to-do list. For multiplatform Desktop apps, you will find that the Canvas class offers everything you need. In order to show you how easy it can be, follow this tutorial to recreate the ImageWell UI class control, provided by default in the Xojo framework. Our customized ImageWell will be able to proportionally display any JPEG file dropped by the user on the control, centering it on the available surface.
Comments closedWhile working on an app I found myself in an unexpected situation when a piece of code that had been working fine began to throw an OutOfBoundException. After a bit of debugging I found that the culprit was the length of an array passed to the AddRow method of a ListBox instance.
Object Oriented Programming (OOP) puts in our hands the ability to create apps in a flexible and powerful way. Xojo embraces that philosophy in the Xojo language itself, allowing us to implement code in a flexible way for reuse, extension and maintainability that reduces the development cycles. One of these language tools is, in fact, common in other low level programming languages: Casting or type conversion. If you are interested in this (and you should be), continue reading and discover what it is, why you should be interested in it and how can you use it in your next Xojo app!
Comments closed