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Tag: Rapid Application Development

Simple Web Development with Xojo

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.

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Making a Web App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

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.

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JSON Feed Web App

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.

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Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

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Taking Your App From In-House to Commercial

Server Ranger started life as a small in-house Xojo console project that I used to monitor servers for several clients. Rather than getting paged (in the very early days) or getting angry phonecalls from clients, it was much more pleasant to have my app play an alert on my Mac and send me an email to notify me of a server issue. With this heads-up, it was often possible to have the issue resolved before a client even realised there had been an issue.

Like many in-house solutions, the demand on Server Ranger increased over time and it became a more vital part of my business.

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