Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
This post was updated in March 2023 in Testing REST-based Web Services.
Communicating with web services is fun and easy with Xojo. But sometimes it’s not so easy to test the actual REST API calls. As part of preparing materials for the HTTPSocket webinar, I created a simple app in Xojo that lets you test REST APIs. I call it RESTy.
Comments closedWith many things in life, more choices means more freedom of expression. We can pick and choose what we like personally as a way to express ourselves. Such is the world on Linux. The myriad of different Linux distros along with all the different Desktop managers and Window managers available are daunting. While more choices is nice (in general anyway), it can also cause more confusion. As a cross-platform developer, you’re probably aware that every operating system has their own way of dealing with crashes and crash reports. On Linux this is no different, but it is more confusing because not every Linux distro plays by the same configuration. This blog will answer some fundamental questions you may have about what happens when your application crashes on Linux.
Comments closedEric Gibbon has been using Xojo to develop bespoke cross-platform applications for Mac and PC and for the web for 15 years. He lives in Stamford, England, and is an active member of the Xojo UK User Group.
There’s an old programmer’s saying: If it works, leave it alone. But sometimes we have to go back to code that works to make it go faster, because it’s too slow.
Over time I have picked up some tips on how to get better performance from Xojo code. I have used these tips to improve old code running on all platforms and have seen big improvements. They are quick and easy to do.
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If you work with computers, having backups of your data is essential. This particularly came to light recently with people testing out Apple Music and discovering that it could make a mess of your iTunes library. In fact, this happened to me!
But “luck favors the prepared” and I had backups, so this Apple Music glitch only proved to be an annoyance and not a catastrophe.
In my case, I just restored my iTunes library from my Time Machine backup. But I know far too many people that don’t even have any type of backup system in place. I’m here to help.
Comments closedAnyone who is developing software, even if they are the only person working on the project, should be using source control (aka as version control). As you can see, this comes up a lot:
Comments closedAlthough not a new trend in software development, rapid application development (
RAD for short) is again on the upswing. What is RAD? It’s all about creating software quickly. The technology world is
always changing rapidly and change only seems to accelerate. Being able to create your own software and easily adapt to changes is incredibly important to nearly every business.
Speaking at one of their conferences, Gartner principal research analyst Adrian Leow said last week that enterprises are increasingly finding it difficult to build all the mobile apps they need. The demand for mobile apps is increasing far faster than the supply of mobile developers can create them and it’s only going to get worse. This is clearly a problem.
There are three possible solutions to this problem:
Solutions 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive. You could potentially do both. Adrian Leow even points to the solution when he suggests that developers use rapid mobile app development tools. These tools can provide solution 3, but they don’t create necessarily create more developers.
Comments closedWeb apps built with the traditional tools (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) are nothing more than a series of text files and thus not very secure. Once a hacker gets into a server, they can steal your code or modify it. One big advantage web apps built with Xojo have is that Xojo compiles your app to machine code so there’s no code on your server to steal. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of hackers have no experience with machine code, so modifying your app to do something nefarious can be extraordinarily difficult.
Comments closedLast October, I wrote a blog post about how vulnerable Google is in its search business (the overwhelming source of its revenue). I realized this vulnerability after discovering that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, was started for less than $10 million, has equivalent search results, a clean looking interface and a low cost of switching. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over 8 months now, I didn’t make the switch from Google for privacy reasons, I simply liked the cleaner interface, but I’ll be honest and say that the privacy it offers is something I appreciate. Apparently, I’m among a growing group of savvy searchers.
Over the course of the last year, there have been a huge number of changes to the Xojo compiler (just under 800 commits). We made large refactorings, like rewriting how unqualified name lookup works. We fixed around 35 bugs, some of them dating back years. We added major new features to the language, including ‘Using’, Iterators, and new data types. To top it all off, we shipped support for a completely new platform, iOS, and then met Apple’s deadline for building 64-bit iOS apps.
And after all of that, we ended up with around eight regressions in the compiler. While not the perfect zero, I think this is just as impressive as the changes themselves.
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