Popovers

Similar to WebDialogs, popovers give you the opportunity to improve your apps’ UX. They are ephemeral screens where you can place text and controls.

Unlike the WebDialog, which is always centered and prevents the user to interact with other controls, Popovers can be placed on specific controls, where that information matters.

Think about them as enhanced “contextual menus” but, instead of just plain text menus, you can add anything you like. Have you ever dreamed of adding a WebMapViewer into some sort of contextual menu? Now you can!

The API is very simple. Create a container, add some controls and that’s it, really. You will just have to create a new instance of that container and show it as a Popover, specifying the control it should be pointing to.

Let’s say you have a container, called “MyTextFieldContainer”, and you want to display it below a WebLabel called “MyLabel”. Here is the code:

Var c As New MyTextFieldContainer
c.ShowPopover(MyLabel)

By default, it will be shown below the specified control, but if you want to show it in a different place, you can use the new DisplaySides enumeration. As easy as this:

Var c As New TextFieldContainer
c.ShowPopover(MyLabel, WebContainer.DisplaySides.Top)

As you can see, Web Projects’ Popovers are just container instances that you will show dynamically. That gives you the opportunity to raise events, add custom computed properties or implement the Observer interface. If you are already familiar with Containers, you already know how to use Popovers. Learn more about Popovers.

Displaying contextual menus programmatically

Sometimes Popovers could be overkill for the task. If you just want to display a menu with some textual items inside, a contextual menu might be enough.

Imagine you have a WebTextLabel where you want to display the contextual menu whenever the user Presses on it. In its Opening event you could define the ContextualMenu:

Var menu As New WebMenuItem
menu.AddMenuItem("Foo")
menu.AddMenuItem("Bar")
menu.AddMenuItem("Baz")

Me.ContextualMenu = menu

Implement the WebLabel.Pressed event and add this code:

Me.ContextualMenu.PopUp

As easy as that.

New RemoveControl method

WebViews controls, like WebPage and WebContainer, now supports removing controls. This gives you the missing piece to create GUIs programmatically, as AddControl was already supported .

This can be useful when you are presenting a form to your end user with an unknown amount of fields.

For example, your user is filling the profile and you want to support having multiple contact fields. Some users will want to add 1 phone, others 2, and others would prefer to be contacted just by email.

Adding and removing controls dynamically gives you the opportunity to build this kind of features. Instead of adding a fixed amount of contact methods, you can adapt your app to what your user really needs.

Performance and memory usage improvements

We’re landing at my favorite part, improvements that nobody will see… unless you want to share your server monitoring stats, which is cool.

2024r1 comes with less Disk I/O usage. In my own benchmarks, Xojo Web is now able to serve about 1200 requests per second via the WebApplication.HandleURL event. That’s around a nice 20% more, compared to the previous version.

Also, thanks to Jeremie Leroy (one of our Xojo MVPs) and Bruno Fréchette, we’ve managed to identify and fix some memory leaks. In 2024r1, your web application will be doing a better job at cleaning up after processing requests.

Bug fixes

The list of fixes is big, you can inspect the whole list in the 2024r1 Release Notes page.

Web fixes by category:

• Compiler: 1
• IDE: 7
• Framework: 40

18 extra regressions were reported and fixed during the beta period. A huge thank you to everyone taking the time to test our releases and reporting issues before the final release becomes available.

Conclusion

We hope you are as excited as we are for this release. I’m personally looking forward to see what you’re building, please remember to mention us on your favorite social network so we all can see what you’re working on.

In the meantime, we are already working hard preparing our next release, 2024r2. Spoilers: You will love it!

Happy coding!

Ricardo has always been curious about how things work. Growing up surrounded by computers he became interested in web technologies in the dial-up connections era. Xojo has been his secret weapon and language of preference since 2018. When he’s not online, chances are he will be scuba diving … or crocheting amigurumis. Find Ricardo on Twitter @piradoiv.

Optimizing the Navigator

In Xojo 2023r4 we tackled a performance issue impacting the navigator’s speed, particularly during scrolling. Upon closer examination, we identified that the substantial consumption of resources and time was attributed to the rendering of these basic and compact navigator icons.

What was initially intended as a straightforward drawing of an icon, ended up becoming a needlessly intricate element that significantly impeded overall speed.

The Before and After

In 2023r3, a noticeable lag occurs during scrolling, with the thumbtrack failing to keep pace with the mouse movement.

In 2023r4, scrolling has been significantly improved and the thumbtrack now maintains synchronization with the mouse movement, resulting in a smoother experience.

What other benefits does this change offer?

Having pinpointed the root cause of this issue, we proceeded to implement updates across various instances where the needless drawing persisted. We identified a similar occurrence when rendering command bar icons affecting every keystroke in the code editor and movement in the layout editor. Refactoring this aspect is expected to enhance performance in these specific areas of the IDE. We trust that you will find the IDE more enjoyable following these small and simple changes.

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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Overflowing with Gratitude

Our stacks are overflowing with appreciation. Appreciation for not being overworked that is. That’s what they have been doing, being overworked in Xojo 2023r3 and slowing things down. In 2023r4, we have optimized our stack overflow checks to reduce the unnecessary effort expended on this task. This optimization will be especially valued by macOS users, as our stack overflow checks consumed the most time on that platform. Take for example, how many more functions calls can be made in 2023r4 over 2023r3 in just one second:

Var start As Integer = System.Ticks
Var count As Integer
While System.Ticks - start < 60
  Reflect("Thanks")
  count = count + 1
Wend

MessageBox count.ToString + " functions calls in one second"

Appreciation for our Users

It would be unjust not to recognize the assistance we’ve received from our users, particularly those who consistently report issues for us to address. A special acknowledgment goes out to those who go the extra mile in helping us pinpoint problems and offer valuable tips and solutions. You know who you are, and we sincerely appreciate your contributions!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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Faster HandleURL Responses

With Xojo Web you can create APIs backing your Mobile or Desktop applications. Just by updating to Xojo 2023r4, your web services will get the benefit of much faster responses and the ability to handle many more requests per second.

Just to compare between different Xojo versions, we’ve created some benchmarks using Xojo Web 1 (with Xojo 2019r3.2) and some Xojo Web 2 releases, 2023r3.1 and the latest one, 2023r4.

Here are the results, returning plain text:

And the same test, but this time returning a string generated by JSONItem:

Xojo 2023r4 is capable of serving around 20x more requests per second compared to Web 1, and around 4x compared to Xojo 2023r3.1. And thanks to the reduced latency time, your API will return the contents much faster.

Faster Transfer Rates in Windows and Linux

While working on performance, we’ve found that applications deployed on Windows and Linux were serving large files much slower than those deployed on macOS servers.

William improved the low level code for sockets on those targets, allowing the server to transfer large files at a much faster speed. During my tests, I’ve seen 10x faster transfer rates.

But this doesn’t affect only our Web target! If you are using a ServerSocket with TCPSocket classes, your Console and Desktop applications will also benefit from these improved transfer rates.

Static Assets Cache Control

In this release, we’ve also improved how the framework interacts with the browser. When your user visits your web application for the first time, it will store all of the required JavaScript and CSS files.

This was already happening in previous releases but with a subtle difference. From now on, the browser won’t even need to check with the server if the file has changed since the last visit. This translates to faster load times for your users and less server load for you since the server won’t need to handle all those requests anymore.

Improved Compile Time

In this release, Xojo Web will compile your projects a few seconds faster. The first time you compile your project, it will cache the result of some processes that are only changing between Xojo releases.

Here is a comparison between 2023r3.1 and 2023r4, both are running a debug session of a blank project:

That’s around 3-4 seconds faster every time a project compiles.

Events Improvements

Some web controls were sending information from the browser to the server more frequently than needed. For example, a WebContainer.Scrolled event was being sent for every scrolled pixel, causing unnecessary server load.

We’ve been reviewing these controls and have made some improvements:

• WebCombobox
• WebContainer
• WebSearchField
• WebTextArea
• WebTextField
• WebUploader

All of them will continue communicating their state updates, but the framework will focus on delivering the latest value available.

For example, in a WebSearchField, if the user writes “hello”, the framework will send the first key press (“h”) as soon as it happens. The next event it will send will depend on how fast the user types, so it can be either “hel” or maybe directly “hello”. What is guaranteed is the TextChanged event will be fired for the final value (“hello” in this example).

New Experimental Option

WebSession has a new experimental option available, disabled by default. “Send Events in Batches”:

Turning it on will make our JavaScript framework group different event notifications in a single request. Projects that contain complex layouts that show and hide several controls at once may benefit from snappier GUIs.

As a side effect, it will also ensure the events arrive to the server in the correct order. Think about a login screen where the user has an email field, a password and a “Login” button with the Default setting turned on (to allow the user to trigger the Pressed event by pressing the Enter key). When sending the events in different requests, because of network latencies, the WebButton.Pressed event could arrive at the server before the last WebTextField.TextChanged.

We would love to hear your experiences when turning on this experimental option. If you find an issue, please report it.

Wrapping Up

As always, while Xojo 2023r4 comes with a lot of performance improvements, it also comes with bug fixes and feature requests. I want to again thank everyone who took the time to create new Bug reports and Feature Requests, and tested the pre-releases.

We’re looking forward to see what you build with it!

Ricardo has always been curious about how things work. Growing up surrounded by computers he became interested in web technologies in the dial-up connections era. Xojo has been his secret weapon and language of preference since 2018. When he’s not online, chances are he will be scuba diving … or crocheting amigurumis. Find Ricardo on Twitter @piradoiv.

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