Although 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.
Xojo Programming Blog Posts
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:
- Find a way to decrease the demand of mobile apps. (Good luck with that one.)
- Increase the number of mobile developers.
- Decrease the time it takes to build mobile apps.
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 closedIf you log into a Xojo Cloud server with an FTP client and have your app make changes to that server (such as creating or deleting files or folders), your FTP client will NOT see those changes, even after a refresh. This applies to Xojo Cloud or apps you have on another server.
Comments closedThe code editor tries to help you see what code groups together. For instance, it draws small lines between matching block beginning statements like IF, SELECT CASE and their closers (END, END IF or END SELCT):
Comments closedIn this episode of XojoTalk, Paul talks with Justin Elliott, IT and Development Manager at Penn State University.
Download MP3.
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 closedOver 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.
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.
In this episode of XojoTalk, Paul talks with Ken Whitaker, the Managing Director of Leading Software Maniacs, an expert in leadership, project management and Agile development.
Comments closedOne of the things announced at WWDC last week (that was not announced in the WWDC Keynote) is that Apple has now combined the separate iOS and Mac Developer Programs into the single Apple Developer Program. So what does this mean for Xojo developers?
Comments closed