If you are just starting the development of your first web app you may be wondering if you need to get a Xojo Cloud server right away. In most cases, the answer is no. You can develop your application on your own computer and sign up for a Xojo Cloud server when you are getting close to deployment and are ready to test in as close to a real world situation as possible.
There are differences of course between how a web app will execute on your computer with a single user (you) versus on a server that is anywhere from hundreds to thousands of miles away with many users connected all at the same time. For the most part, you don’t have to think very much about this but there are areas where you should.
Keep the following 3 things in mind when developing without a cloud server.
At each XDC (Xojo Developer Conference) I lay out, however roughly, what Xojo’s short-term development roadmap looks like for the next 12 months or so. Despite how well-conceived that roadmap may be, sometimes unexpected events occur that change or delay things.
Before we dive into what it means for developers, and in particular Xojo and other cross-platform developers, that IBM is pushing the Mac, let’s look at the recent history of the computer market. 10 years ago, the Mac had market share in the low single digits and was ignored by most of the world. These days the Windows PC market is in decline while the market share for Mac is rising at the expense of Windows.
With the release of Xojo 2017 Release 2 we have updated our Linux Desktop framework to use GTK+ 3 instead of GTK+ 2. For those not familiar with Linux, GTK+ is a User Interface (i.e. UI) toolkit, much like Cocoa is for macOS and Win32 controls (or WinForms.NET or WPF) is for Windows. GTK+ 2 has been supplying the user interface for Xojo Desktop apps for Linux since we first targeted Linux over a decade ago. It has since been deprecated in favor of GTK+ 3 for quite some time now and GTK+ 2 is typically not installed by default on most Linux distros these days, which makes deploying Xojo Desktop apps on Linux more painful. Unfortunately GTK+ 3 is not ABI compatible with GTK+ 2 so we could not migrate to using GTK+ 3 without completely ditching GTK+ 2.
Let’s take a closer look at what this means for your Linux apps:
Are you tired of the hassles of creating web apps using PHP? Why not develop faster and smarter with Xojo?
Like PHP, Xojo is object-oriented. Unlike PHP, Xojo has a coherent framework design that is easy to work with; plus the Xojo language is simple and focused.
Do you find it frustrating to create web apps? HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX can be challenging, and frameworks such as Node, React, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, PHP and Java are often overwhelming for those just beginning web development.
There is a simpler solution: Xojo. Using a single programming language and a single IDE, you can go from zero to a working web app in an amazingly short amount of time with Xojo.
In previous articles, I’ve written about how Xojo is often much, much easier to use and more capable than Visual Studio for Mac for creating Mac and cross-platform desktop apps.
Visual Studio can also create web apps and as it would turn out, you may find that Xojo is a better option for web apps.
Technically, Visual Studio for Mac can create ASP.NET Core Web Apps. These type of web apps use the ASP.NET framework, but do not provide a form (layout editor) for your app’s user interface. Instead you’ll have to create everything in code, including mapping UI actions to corresponding code. ASP.NET Core also requires you to use the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern, which can be a bit daunting for beginners.
Recently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based, making them complex to work with. As its name implies, JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler.
In fact, it is so simple that you can easily make web, desktop and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo web app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code.
Visual Studio for Mac was recently released. In a previous post I compared how much easier it is to make native Mac apps with Xojo than with Visual Studio for Mac. Now I’d like to talk about making cross-platform desktop apps.
Here are the questions people asked during our February “What is Xojo” webinar. Did you miss the webinar? It’s less than 30 minutes and you can watch it right here:
