Xojo Cloud is the easiest way to deploy a Xojo web app and you don’t have to do any maintenance on the server, we take care of that for you. It is secure, with a smart firewall, intrusion and hacking detection, and Security-Enhanced Linux to keep your apps secure. You can also set up SSL, MySQL and more with just a mouse-click. Xojo Cloud comes in a variety of packages offering options on RAM, storage and vCPU, so you can purchase the plan that is right for you.

We have more people deploying Xojo web apps to Xojo Cloud than ever before! If you have any questions about Xojo Cloud, please reach out to us.

Jason grew up in the Oklahoma City area and has been on the Xojo team since the beginning! When he’s not working, you’ll find him spending time with his wife and son, hiking, playing tennis or just relaxing at home. He also enjoys trading stocks and watching Oklahoma Sooner football!

I first made a desktop Secret Santa app back in 2015 for an event with friends. We were tired of drawing names out of a hat and having couples being paired together. The app I created solved that problem because couples were excluded from offering a gift to each other. And we didn’t need a hat!

In November of 2018, I had the idea of making a Secret Santa iOS app so that anyone with an iPhone or iPad could benefit from the same features I had been enjoying for the past 3 years.

The app would need to be easy to use, avoid couples getting matched with each other, send notifications by email without letting the organizer know which pairs were matched, and of course make sure no name would be assigned twice.

After just 8 days of development, the app was ready to ship and sent to the App Store.

Within 5 days, the app had been downloaded from 35 different countries and was my fastest app to reach 1000 downloads!

Having the app translated to English, French, Italian, and Spanish in the initial release helped to reach more users.

Version 1.1 of the app was released a few days later with German and Portuguese translations.

That’s when I realized that Secret Santa is something extremely common in Latin America. Many families draw names for Christmas so that they can give and receive one big gift instead of smaller trivial gifts for each family member.

Most updates of the app came with new localizations, which really helped in realizing more and more downloads. After 3 years of updates, the app is now available in 32 languages.

A high quantity of downloads also meant that I received a lot of feedback from users. Many users were happy with the current features, but I started getting feature requests to send the gift pairs by SMS or WhatsApp instead of by email. We all have a parent or grand-parent who isn’t tech-savvy and doesn’t have an email address.

Leveraging the biggest advantage of Xojo – Sharing code across platforms

From 2018 until 2022, I had become used to updating the Secret Santa app itself to add new features and new translations while also fixing bugs. This year, I received a message from an unhappy user stating that they really need a wishlist feature and downloaded my app thinking it already had one.

A valid wishlist feature needed to be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, whether they used a computer, an iPhone, or an Android device.

Using Xojo Web and a coding language I already knew was the obvious choice for this task. Sharing important bits of code from my main iOS project to the web wishlist project was as easy as copy and paste.

As with any Xojo project, copying classes from one project to the other was a real time saver, especially for the API layer required to communicate between Xojo and the online database that holds all the Secret Santa data.

The main difficulty working on a web project came from the UI. Not that Xojo Web’s UI is difficult, but I am so used to designing mobile apps that my brain didn’t know where to start.

I knew I wanted to display two columns of data:

• The user’s wishlist
• The wishlist from the person they are offering a gift to

The layout had to be responsive to be accessible on both mobile and desktop devices.

Graffitisuite from Anthony Cyphers came to mind, and within a few minutes of reviewing the online demo, I was convinced to use GraffitiKanban web control. I am a big fan of Trello for organizing my work, displaying cards in labeled columns. That’s exactly what I needed for the wishlist feature.

GraffitiKanban is “responsive” (Web Design term), meaning the display changes to adapt to smaller screens such as mobile devices.

GraffitiSuite also offers a wide variety of UI elements that made me save a lot of time.

7 days after the initial feature request, the wishlist feature was available to all.

Wishlist on a desktop browser:

Wishlist on a mobile browser:

Deploying the app to Xojo Cloud was extremely easy.

A single button press in Xojo, a subdomain DNS record, 2 minutes of configuration in Cloudflare, and the web app was up, running, and accessible through HTTPS.

Customer use of the wishlist feature has blown-up more than I ever would have expected. So far 30,000 gift ideas have been added to the wishlist (and counting).

The next feature request

With an app that sees 60,000 new users per month, I receive a lot of feature requests. Most recently, I received a one star review on the app store because my app isn’t accessible to the Visually Impared. When VoiceOver is activated, all it says is “button”, “button”, “button”, with no explanation.

Adding voice-over capabilities in Xojo is simple. The MobileUIControl class has two String properties, AccessibilityHint and AccessibilityLabel.

But it actually is a lengthy task to check each control on each screen and make sure that the translations are correct.

VoiceOver support will soon be released in English and French, but all other localizations will be only ready next year. It is currently a bad time to get 30 different translators to work on the project under such short notice.

Xojo has enabled me to create a business out of developing iOS apps for the App Store. Including all of my apps, I have had over 6.5 million downloads and counting. Secret Santa is a prime example of what is possible and how you can leverage your Xojo skills to expand to other platforms when you need to. I look forward to what’s to come and will be at XDC London to learn more about the future.

If you are organizing a Secret Santa event or just curious to see the app, download Secret Santa on the App Store.

Jérémie Leroy has been using Xojo since 2008, he won two Xojo Design Awards in the iOS App category and has released over 13 iOS apps made with Xojo on the App Store. He also released iOSDesignExtensions on Github to help style and polish your Xojo made iOS apps.

Starting in Xojo 2021r2, users with a Xojo Cloud server can deploy web apps which can hook into the Apple Push Notification service directly with a user friendly Xojo API.

Things You Will Need

1. An iOS App that is set up to accept remote notifications.
2. An Apple Push Notification Certificate. You can get this from your Apple Developer control panel at https://developer.apple.com/account, under Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles. When doing so, you’ll want to make note of your Apple account identifier (in the upper right corner of the window) and the certificate Key ID located in the Key details. Both of these are 10 character alphanumeric codes at this time.
3. A Xojo Cloud server. Depending on your needs, even a small server will likely do.

Sending a Basic Remote Notification

The first thing you’ll need to do is to add your APNs certificate to your Xojo Cloud server. This can be done by logging into the Xojo Cloud Control Panel and clicking the Options Tab. There you will find a link that says Manage APNs Certificates. Clicking that will take you to a dialog which allows you to add and remove APNs certificates for a machine.

Sending remote notifications is a relatively simple process, but there’s a little infrastructure you’ll need. Typically the process goes something like this:

In your iOS application which will be receiving the remote notifications, you’ll need to request permission to show notifications (if the notifications will be visible to the user) and then register for remote notifications. When you do this, you’ll be provided with a hex-encoded globally unique token that identifies this device for your app. This identifier should be sent to your notification server along with any information that you may need to determine what type of user this is. This identifier may change from time to time so you should request it whenever your app is launched and send the new one to your server whenever it changes.

In your Xojo Cloud app, sending one or more notifications is relatively easy. You’ll need to create two objects:

1. An instance of XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.DeliveryOptions which is where you’ll put the Application Identifier of the iOS application to which you are sending, the Apple account identifier and the certificate Key ID. This class also defines when the messages you are sending will expire, their priority and their type.
2. For each message being sent, you’ll need an instance of XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.Message which defines the content of the message.

Your code might look something like this:

// Set up Delivery Options
Var deliveryOpts As New XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.DeliveryOptions(kAppID, kAPNSKeyID, kAppleTeamID)

// Set up a message
Var message As New XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.Message
message.alertTitle = "Bethany's Bagels – Sale Today!"
message.alertBody = "Today Only – Buy one bagel, get one 50% off!"
message.badge = 1
message.soundName = "default"

// Assuming this RowSet contains all of the device tokens that you are sending to:
Var rs as RowSet = db.SelectSQL(kQueryToGetDeviceTokens)
While Not rs.AfterLastRow
  XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.SendAppleNotification(message, deliveryOpts, rs.Column("token").StringValue)
  rs.MoveToNextRow
Wend
rs.close

Sending Notifications With APNs Feedback

The second signature for SendAppleNotification allows you to get feedback from Apple’s Push Notification service, including situations like when a device token is no longer valid which can happen if the user turns off notifications or deletes your app from their device. Because sending messages is asynchronous, you will need to define a callback method and include a pointer to that method when calling SendAppleNotification, like this:

// Signature for the callback method
Sub CallbackMethod(MessageID as String, error as RuntimeException)

When you pass the address of the callback method, SendAppleNotification will return a unique message identifier so that if the callback is called, you can identify which notification failed.

Var messageID as String
messageID = XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.SendAppleNotification(message, deliveryOpts, rs.Column("token").StringValue, AddressOf CallbackMethod)

The possible response codes are defined here.

Advanced Usage

The Xojo Framework covers a large portion of the capabilities of the Apple Push Notification service, but Apple is adding new features all the time. In addition to the two methods described above, there are two methods which take a JSONItem instead of a XojoCloud.RemoteNotifications.Message object. Using this method you can define the message payload which uses features which have not yet been added to the Xojo framework.

Documentation of the JSON payload can be found in the Apple Developer documentation here.

Demo

Here’s a short video showing a remote notification being sent from a Xojo Cloud server in the datacenter in New York City to an iPhone at my house in North Carolina.