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Category: Web

Posts related to web development.

Speeding up the Layout Editor

For more years than I’d like to admit, the Layout Editor has been slow in terms of dragging controls around. As you add more controls, it gets worse. For web layouts, it’s been even worse. That’s primarily because we have to draw everything for a web layout whereas for a desktop layout, the OS draws the controls for us.

In an engineering meeting, I mentioned a discussion I had with a user about the speed of the Layout Editor and Travis said he had recently been reminded of how slow it was too. While most of the time issues in Xojo are carefully calculated and prioritized for maximum bang for the buck (as we say around here), that’s not always how it happens. After the meeting, Travis decided to dive into the Layout Editor code and see what could be done to speed it up.

The results are pretty remarkable.

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Web: Create Sliding-Animated Menus

Sometime ago a Xojo user asked if it is possible to use Xojo Web to create the kind of animated menus seen in several regular websites. After some investigation (and the invaluable help of Greg O’Lone), the answer is: yes, you can do that! If you are interested in seeing how to achieve this, continue reading!

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Animating the Web: Fading Images in-out

This tutorial will show you how easy it is to create animations on components of Xojo web apps, thanks to the use of the Style Editor and the WebAnimator class. Learn how to do a fade effect between two images that you can expand and adapt to your web apps.

In order to recreate this fade effect we’ll mainly use a couple of styles (WebStyle class) to set the initial status for each one of our images (instances from the WebImageView class). These will be overlaped in the web page, sharing the same position. Then we’ll add a button to the web page so it will fire the animation every time it is clicked.

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Web Services Part II: Xojo Web, at your service

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!

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Tutorial: Saving WebCanvas Images to Disk

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.

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Web Services: Xojo Web, at your service

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.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 9 – Quote Web Service

We’re wrapping up week 9 of #JustCode with a web app that demonstrates a web service, JSON and SQLite. The web app functions as both an app with a UI and a web service. It lets you enter your own quotes which are saved in a SQLite database. The web service randomly fetches a quote and returns it as JSON.

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PDF File Generation? There is an API for that!

I’ve heard it several times: how can I export to PDF from Xojo? Sure, there are lots of answers pointing to a bunch of resources, including excellent plug-ins from third parties. But can you accomplish the same thing using an already available API? Yes, there is a remote API for that! The requirement is that your Xojo app will need to have access to Internet … and, of course, you’ll need to do just a bit of coding.

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