Hi there,
the topic says it all. Are there any members who switched from Livecode to Xojo and would share their experience? How long did it take to get familiar with it?
I am seriously thinking of switching and I am a total newbie regarding Xojo/Realbasic.
Regards,
Matthias
just curious what makes you want to switch from livecode ?
Livecode just basically committed suicide by introducing a crazy new super expensive licensing plan.
that is around which kind of $/year ?
If you build internal apps, every developer and every person who uses the app must have a license at $440/year. If you sell commercial apps, than every developer must have a license plus you pay 5% of your app revenue. There are more parts to it but that’s the general idea.
It should be alarming to potential customers that information isn’t available directly on the website and that you must use a contact form to find that out.
that is indeed insanely expensive … Apple royalties on the AppStore seems cheap beside that…
Wow, that takes me back to the days of 4D (a database programming system).
with 4D you did not have to pay every year…you “only” had to pay for each running app … and your dev environment.
Agreed, but you did have to pay for upgrades and they weren’t cheap.
Dataflex was the same, one developer license and one runtime license for each installation. Every license was paid for concurrent users in blocks of 4. Both development and runtime. Mine continue running today (in SCO Unix) 
Are you using LiveCode to build x-plat applications or just for one platform? If you need just one platform, I would suggest researching the FREE development tools from that platform vendor.
In the right hands, Xojo can be a very capable tool, but it is behind other tools. Xojo recently wiped out a whole load of resources when they changed the language, so some sample code you find won’t work any more. Xojo relies on plugins a lot to add missing capabilities.
As someone who’s recently started migrating away from Xojo, I chose a much wider used tool and while the learning curve is steep, it has a much larger community, which makes it much easier to do the things I want to do, and I’ve made a bunch of new friends.
Welcome @Matthias_Rebbe
Though I’ve never used Livecode, I did come from another programming background other than Xojo, before landing here. I’m at the retirement end of my career now (after 20+ years of C# / T-SQL) and find Xojo an easy and relaxing change of pace.
@Sam_Rowlands has a point, if you are only targeting one platform (and you’re younger and have the patience & energy), then there is lots of free options out there (with the aforementioned learning curve).
But, if you do want cross-platform or an easier way at seeing results quickly, Xojo can work quite well. I myself like to just build macOS Desktop apps using Xojo, so a “Lite” license is enough for me.
Sam is referring to an initiative that started in 2019 to migrate the Xojo language forward from its “BASIC” beginnings to include more modern terminology and naming conventions. The differences are commonly referred to here as API1 (the original REALBasic/Xojo syntax) and API2.
The migration did take a few years, but it is pretty much settled now (I think?). So, as a potential newbie, just jump forward to learning API 2.
I think many of the popular code repos in Xojo have already been updated to API 2, and for the ones that haven’t, many will still work. Meaning it is possible to mix API 1 & 2 in the same project, with some exceptions of course. Plus it is possible to update API 1 to 2, when needed.
And for those of us that want or need some really advanced features and functionality, we have some excellent 3rd party Plugin vendors. MBS and Einhugur are the most popular ones. Plus GraffitiSuite offers quite an array of custom controls built using the Xojo language itself.
I hope Xojo works out for you. All the best!
It moved the language side ways or backwards. It definitely did not move it forwards.
I view the new database methods (with built-in statement preparation) as a definite step forwards, along with some new String methods. The changes to event names less so.
API 2 synchronised the language to be much more consistent across environments (Desktop, Web and iOS) making it much easier for me to create projects that run on all environments and share the exact same external code.
FileMaker did the big price increase thing too. We left that and moved to Xojo.
That is exactly what I just did. I am so pissed off with Livecode’s ridiculous licensing schemes and broken promises that I finally moved over to Xojo. The sale didn’t hurt my decision either. I JUST updated my Livecode license for hundreds of dollars and then they announce they are abandoning Livecode for a farcical no code SAAS editor with royalties, blah, blah, blah. Enough is enough. I hope Xojo is what I have been looking for. I bought the Pro license, so at least I can deploy to all formats and I used to program in Real Basic, which this used to be, I believe.
I created many programs in Livecode over the years but ALWAYS had to stick to Desktop since mobile and web never really worked as promised. I plan on moving all my software to Xojo instead.
I used to also program in Delphi and still have v11 Architect for my company, but I cannot afford their insane pricing model either ($7,000 per year). I program in a ton of web languages, so I have IDEs for that as well. Perhaps Xojo will be my one IDE to rule them all?
Welcome back to the community! Web development in Xojo is in a much better state now. A few years ago when they introduced Web 2, it was useable but pretty rough. Now with @Ricardo_Cruz dedicated to the web framework, it is getting faster and better every year. Keep your business logic out of the UI and you can share code among Web and Desktop pretty easily. Good luck and I know many here will be glad to help if you run into snags.
Welcome. As a long time Visual Foxpro developer, we made the move to Realbasic/XOJO when MS decided to abandon the VFP application. We still have a very large manufacturer running legacy VFP applications that we will eventually migrate to XOJO.
We’re rewritten our commercial applications in XOJO and these are now cross platform and easy to maintain. I think you will find xojo flexible and powerful.