I’ve had the pleasure of working with Tim multiple times over nearly 10 years now. Tim is one of those people who makes a community, he’s a connector, bringing people into a group and highlighting common ground for the benefit of us all. It’s not hard to find out what Tim is doing these days, you can read all about it on his blog, watch his videos and webinars and read his Xojo interview series in xDev Magazine. In this month’s Spotlight On feature, Tim answers questions about his latest, and biggest, project and his ongoing success using Xojo.

Mac, Windows or Linux?

All three.

I do all of my work on a MacBook Pro. That’s where I’m running the Xojo IDE, doing testing, and so on. But I’m developing apps that also run on Windows and Linux, too. When I’m developing a Windows app, I usually do my initial testing using a Windows VM running in Parallels. Over the past few years, the amount of Linux projects that I work on has increased significantly. I’m developing a lot of console apps that run on Linux.

Here’s something that I discovered about a year ago, and that your readers might find interesting. Xojo apps that are compiled for Linux (Linux x86 64-bit in particular) will run on servers that are running Oracle’s “Oracle Linux Server” operating system. Oracle’s cloud (which they call “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” or “OCI” for short) run that version of Linux, which is similar to Fedora. A lot of companies that are running on NetSuite (which Oracle owns) are “all in” with OCI. So the fact that Xojo apps can be compiled to run on OCI servers is a pretty big deal. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for Xojo developers to meet the demand for custom software coming from companies that are in investing in OCI.

What do you wish more people would ask/talk to you about regarding programming?

I have a pretty popular blog, and I do get a lot of technical questions from readers. Occasionally, I get questions like “How can I break into the NetSuite space?” What they’re really asking about are strategies for finding opportunities, technical things that they should learn about, and so on.

But it’s the non-technical things that they don’t ask about that I think are really important. For example, learning about business in general. Learning about accounting. And if they’re looking to “go solo,” learning how to build authority, stay organized, and so on.

How would you explain your most recent project to a new developer?

One of the biggest challenges that companies face when they’re switching from one business system to another is migrating data between the two systems. Some companies think that this is the final step before “going live” with the new system – and it certainly is.

But the reality is that they’ll likely need to do this data migration several times, especially as they test the new system. In some cases, they’ll run the two systems in parallel and compare the results of the two systems, to make sure the new system is being implemented correctly.

I’m currently working on a very large, very complicated NetSuite implementation, and we ran into this need. Using Xojo, I developed an app called the “Data Bridge” which we’re using to sync data between their current system (which was developed using Progress – https://progress.com) and their NetSuite instance. It takes data that was exported from Progress as pipe-delimited files, parses and validates the data, and then makes API calls to push the data into NetSuite. This is helping us test NetSuite more thoroughly, using current, real data, so that there will be no surprises when we do go live.

What’s next on your “Learn Next” list?

For the longest time, I’ve felt that AI – and especially generative AI – is overhyped. So I mostly ignored it. Now that the excitement has settled down a bit, I’ve started to look at AI in a serious way. NetSuite recently made some generative AI APIs available to developers, so I’ve been experimenting with those. One of the projects that I’m currently working on involves developing a Xojo-based mobile app that integrates with NetSuite, leveraging the data stored in NetSuite as well as its AI functionality.

What is something that has surprised you about coding in the last 10 years?

I think that like a lot of developers that have been working professionally for awhile, I was surprised by the popularity of Javascript, and how widespread it’s used, especially for developing backend Web apps. The other thing that has surprised me is the increasing number of developers that really don’t want to write code. There seem to be a lot of people that pursue careers in software development simply because they think it’s a way to “make big money.” One of the things that
I love about the Xojo community is that most of the Xojo developers that I’ve talked to seem to find joy in writing code. (You can also see this on the Forum, too.)

Xojo isn’t the only tool in your kit. What is a piece of software more people should know about?

There are a couple of other development tools that I use and recommend, and that I encourage other Xojo developers to check out.

One is DataGrip by JetBrains, which I started using about a year ago. DataGrip is a cross- platform database tool that supports a very wide range of relational databases. I use it often in my NetSuite work, especially when I need to explore the schema of the Oracle database that a NetSuite instance is powered by.

Another tool that I recommend is RapidAPI (which was formerly known as “Paw”). I’ve been using RapidAPI since it was first released, and it’s my API tool of choice. There’s another API tool called “Postman”that is certainly much more popular, but I really prefer RapidAPI. It seems to me to be much more Mac-like.

One more tool that I want to mention – and this one is brand new – is called “Framous.” Framous makes it easy to add device frames around screenshots. So you can take a screenshot of an app – such as one running on your Mac or in a simulator – and then drop the screenshot into a device frame – such as a Mac or iPhone. It’s great for creating images to be used for marketing purposes. The app is available on the Mac App Store.

When did you start using Xojo?

I started using Xojo in August of 2015 – nearly 10 years ago!

How did you find Xojo?

Hal Gumbert encouraged me to check out Xojo, and I’m so glad that he did. At the time, we were both FileMaker developers. I had grown frustrated with the FileMaker platform and was looking for a new development tool to work with.

What did you first build with Xojo?

When I first started working with Xojo, I was interested in developing iOS apps – and Xojo’s support for the iOS framework had just been released. So the timing was perfect. In fact, then first Xojo license that I purchased was only for iOS. There were two iOS apps that I immediately developed with Xojo. One integrated with FileMaker and the other integrated with Airtable. (At the time, I was serving as Airtable’s “Developer Evangelist.”)

What do you build with it now? 

I now use Xojo to develop all kinds of apps – desktop, mobile, Web, and console apps – and for all of the platforms that Xojo supports too (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android). When I first started using Xojo, I never would have guessed that someday I’d be developing so many different types of apps.

It surprises me that out of all of the types of apps that I develop with Xojo, these days it’s Linux console apps that I’m developing the most. These apps are primarily used to automate processes involving NetSuite, such as batch file processors, webhook listeners and senders, and more. So essentially I’m using Xojo – and console apps especially – to extend NetSuite’s capabilities.

What is something you worked on recently that you want to talk about?

I mentioned a few of my current projects earlier, but two of the more interesting projects that I’m working on are Suite.js (a JavaScript runtime that’s designed to make NetSuite integration easy) and SuiteBrowser (a Web browser designed specifically for use with NetSuite). Both of those projects might sound like crazy ideas. I mean, what kind of crazy person develops their own web browser?!? But I can tell you, based on the level of interest in them from the NetSuite community, that there’s a genuine need for both of them.

Do you earn a living with Xojo? 

Absolutely. So much of my work these days – including my NetSuite work – involves Xojo. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it.

Also, I want to give a shout out to Christian Schmitz and MonkeyBread Software. His Xojo plug-ins have enabled me to work on Xojo projects that I never would have dreamed of working on, including projects that utilize things like MQTT, Phidgets, and more.

Do you use it for your hobbies? 

Yes, I do. My main hobby these days is developing apps that run on Raspberry Pi’s, and of course, I’m using Xojo to create them. As a side note, I recently purchased my fifth Raspberry Pi – a Raspberry Pi 500 – and I love working with it. It reminds me what it was like to use Macs and PCs “back in the day.”

What’s your biggest Xojo success?

Out of all of the apps that I’ve developed with Xojo, the one that I use every day is called SuiteTransmit. SuiteTransmit is a desktop app that monitors the files that I’m working on, detects changes to them, and automatically uploads them to NetSuite. It allows me to develop NetSuite “SuiteScript” apps using my preferred IDE (BBEdit). This simple app, which, thanks to Xojo, took only a few hours to develop, has saved me a lot of time. SuiteTransmit is one of my “secret weapons,” and I don’t think I could have, or would have ever even attempted to develop it, without Xojo.

But my biggest “Xojo success” doesn’t involve any one particular app that I’ve developed with it. Over the years, I’ve blogged about my Xojo work, and been a guest on several Xojo webinars. Last summer, a company that was looking for help implementing NetSuite stumbled upon my NetSuite / Xojo work, liked what they saw, and reached out to me for help. They’re now my biggest client, and the biggest client I’ve had throughout my entire career. And I owe that to Xojo.

Thank you to Tim Dietrich for answering questions and sharing his Xojo experience with the community. Learn more about Tim on his blog, find him on LinkedIn and read his interviews in xDev Magazine.

If you have an app, a project or a person you want to see featured in Spotlight On, tell us about it!

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Downloading the Xojo Project

The Xojo project that we developed during the webinar is available for download here:

https://tdietrich-opensource.s3.amazonaws.com/Xojo/Xojo%20NetSuite%20Web%20Demo%20-%2020240222.01.zip

In the zip file, you’ll find the project and a “Readme” file that includes instructions on how to set things up (including SuiteTalk REST, a custom NetSuite role, an integration record, etc).

I suggest downloading the project, setting up NetSuite, and running the project. Then look at how the project was built during the webinar – the objects, methods, and constants that I added, and so on. After you’re familiar with the project file, experiment with it. Maybe try modifying the project so that instead of providing access to Order Status information, it provides access to Item information instead (quantity available, pricing, etc).

If you run into any problems, or have questions, please feel free to email me (timdietrich@me.com). Another resource for more general Xojo questions is the Xojo Programming Forum.

I want to thank everyone that attended the webinar, as well as Geoff and the Xojo team for the opportunity to present. I hope that the webinars have increased your awareness of and interest in Xojo, and especially in using Xojo to develop apps that integrate with NetSuite.

Tim Dietrich develops custom software for businesses that are running on NetSuite. He makes extensive use of Xojo to develop mobile, desktop, Web apps, and more – all of which integrate seamlessly with NetSuite. To learn more, visit: https://timdietrich.me

Downloading the Xojo Project

The Xojo project that I demonstrated can be downloaded here. In the zip file, you’ll find the Xojo project file and a “Readme” file. The Readme file includes step-by-step instructions on setting up SuiteTalk REST, a custom NetSuite role, an integration record, and more.

The SuiteQL Query

During the webinar, I spent some time discussing the SuiteQL query that’s used to lookup items based on the keywords that a user enters. I mentioned that there’s a lot of variation between NetSuite instances, both in terms of how they’re configured and customized. That makes NetSuite development both challenging and interesting.

As a result of the variation between NetSuite instances, you may need to modify the SuiteQL query based on how your NetSuite instance is configured. In the Xojo project, you’ll find that the query is stored as a constant named “SuiteQLQuery,” and it’s an attribute of the ListView screen.

The query uses the REGEXP_LIKE condition, which I discussed recently in this blog post. If you’re not already familiar with REGEXP_LIKE, then you might want to read up on it. Also, in the query I’m using the TO_CHAR function to format the “first column Base Price” as currency. Specifically, in the query, you’ll see this: TO_CHAR ( COALESCE( MAX( Price ), 0 ), ‘fmL99G999D00’ ). If you’d like to learn more about the TO_CHAR function and the format model modifiers that it supports, visit: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/sql_elements004.htm#SQLRF00216

Our Next Webinar

Our next Xojo / NetSuite webinar will be held on Thursday, February 22nd at 1PM CT (US). I’ll demonstrate how you can use Xojo to develop a Web app that integrates with NetSuite. To signup, please visit Xojo’s Webinar page. And finally, I want to thank everyone that attended the webinar, as well as Geoff and the entire Xojo team for the opportunity to present.

Tim Dietrich develops custom software for businesses that are running on NetSuite. He makes extensive use of Xojo to develop mobile, desktop, Web apps, and more – all of which integrate seamlessly with NetSuite. To learn more, visit: https://timdietrich.me

This blog post is intended as a follow-up to that webinar. In it, I hope to provide some additional information that we didn’t have time to cover, answer some of the questions that came up during and after the webinar, and also provide a link to the Xojo project that we created during the webinar.

Downloading the Xojo Project

The Xojo project that we developed during the webinar is available for download here. In the zip file, you’ll find the project and a “Readme” file that includes instructions on how to set things up (including SuiteTalk REST, a custom NetSuite role, an integration record, etc).

My advice is to download the project, setup NetSuite, and run the project. Then look at how the project was built -the screens, methods, and so on. After you’re familiar with the project file, experiment with it. Perhaps try modifying the project so that instead of providing access to Items it provides access to Employees instead.

If you run into any problems, or have questions, please feel free to email me (timdietrich@me.com). Another great resource for your general Xojo questions is the Xojo Programming Forum.

Have fun!

Questions & Answers

Do you prefer to use RESTlets instead of SuiteTalk REST? If so, why?

Yes, I much prefer using RESTlets in all of my NetSuite integration projects. With RESTlets I have more control over the functionality that the API provides, and more control over how the responses are formatted. Also, my experience has been that RESTlets are slightly faster than SuiteTalk REST.

That being said, SuiteTalk REST does have some advantages over RESTlets. For example, SuiteTalk REST provides endpoints that you can use to get metadata, which is something that is often difficult to do with a RESTlet. But perhaps the biggest advantage of SuiteTalk REST is that, unlike RESTlets, there is nothing extra that needs to be installed in your NetSuite account. It’s simply a matter of enabling it.

You mentioned some NetSuite customer statistics in your presentation. Can you repeat those?

Sure. During his SuiteWorld keynote presentation this year, Gary Wiessinger (SVP of NetSuite Application Development) mentioned NetSuite’s growth in terms of the number of customers that are using NetSuite. So as of October 2023, 37,000 customers are using NetSuite, and that represents 324,000 organizations. And those customers are located in 219 countries and territories.

As a Xojo developer, how can I get started with NetSuite?

You should first try to get access to a NetSuite account that you can experiment with. Unfortunately, that’s not as easy as it is with other platforms (such as Salesforce or ServiceNow), where they provide developers with test accounts. My advice would be to reach out to a local NetSuite partner, and see if you can build a relationship with them, and try to get their help in getting started.

After the demo, you mentioned another Xojo project that extends the Android functionality. What was that?

It’s called Android Design Extensions, and there’s a great blog post about it here. Read multiple posts about Android Design Extensions on the Xojo Blog.

Wrapping Up

Thanks again for your interest in Xojo and in using it to develop apps that integrate with NetSuite. I hope you’ve found the webinar and the Xojo project to be helpful.

Happy holidays!

Tim Dietrich develops custom software for businesses that are running on NetSuite. He makes extensive use of Xojo to develop mobile, desktop, Web apps, and more – all of which integrate seamlessly with NetSuite. To learn more, visit: https://timdietrich.me

Tim is quite familiar with the NetSuite API and created an easy to use, free and open source Xojo class that does the heavy lifting on things like authentication, so that you can focus on sending data back and forth. Check out the video of the webinar and Tim’s blog post about it for more details.

Geoff is the Founder and CEO of Xojo, Inc. He started what became Xojo in 1996 and he has been working to improve it ever since. When he’s not steering the ship at Xojo, he’s keeping the beat for the band he formed in high school and learning Korean.

One project that was just shared with me was from Tim Dietrich, a Xojo user who has spoken at our user conferences (see 2018 presentation and 2019 panel). Late last year Tim shared that he was working on a project that could get Xojo in front of a new audience and he’s blogged with some updates along the way. Yesterday he released SuiteTransmit, which is an application for NetSuite developers to monitor files they are working on and when a file is changed, it is automatically uploaded to the File Cabinet.

About the project and development process, Tim commented:

I developed SuiteTransmit so that my NetSuite development work would be more efficient, and so that I could use my preferred development tool (BBEdit). When I started working on the app, I had a basic idea of what I wanted it to do and how I wanted it to work, but I wasn’t sure what it would take to build it. 

The first version of the app (which was essentially a proof-of-concept) was a Xojo console app. It monitored files in a specific directory, and when a change was detected, the updated file was uploaded to NetSuite via a custom API. It worked, and I immediately felt more efficient. That was encouraging, and the development process was very fast. That’s one of the things I like about Xojo: You can go from a concept to a working solution in no time at all.

Then I realized that the console app approach wasn’t ideal, especially when it came to launching the app, passing parameters via the command line, and so on. So I took some of the code I had developed in the console app, and repurposed it in a Xojo desktop app. That was extremely easy to do. I then improved the interface a little, and added support for configuration files (so that I could use the app when working on multiple projects). It quickly started to feel like a “real app.” And I have to admit, as geeky as it sounds, it was cool to see my app’s icon in the macOS toolbar.

That was all back in November of last year, and I’ve been using the app ever since then. It has absolutely been a game changer for me. My NetSuite development work is now much more like the Web development work that I’ve been doing for years. SuiteTransmit empowers me to use a development approach and workflow that I’m familiar with. And because I can now make changes to my apps more quickly and efficiently, I’m much more likely to experiment and try new development techniques.

At that point, I decided that I’d make SuiteTransmit available to other NetSuite developers. I figured that if the app was helping me that much, then it might help others, too. But before releasing it, I needed to test it on Windows, and ensure that it worked properly. That was important because, based on what I know about the NetSuite development community, most developers use Windows-based PCs. During testing, there were some weird differences that I found, and they seemed to be with Windows itself (and not anything that Xojo was doing). Regardless, I was impressed by how easy Xojo made it to get the app working on both platforms. 

A lot of people ask me why I give so many of my development tools away for free. I do it for a number of reasons, but the main one is that I figure that if someone else can benefit from them, and if they make another developer’s work even a little easier, then that’s great. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.

Also, I don’t feel the need to monetize these things. It’s not what I do, or what I want to do, or what I’m good at. I develop custom software. Period. That’s where I’ve found joy and success.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, we love to share what Xojo users are making! We always encourage you to add your projects to the Showcase or reach out to hello@xojo.com anytime to talk about writing a blog post about your app!