I’m using Web 2, but not without some struggling mostly due to style issues as @Ricardo_Cruz mentioned and a significant amount of issues around the Web 2 WebListbox as well as a few other issues with other controls. Most of my Web 1 apps will never be converted since they function as designed and likely will be retired as workflows change rather than improved. The one large Web 2 project I’ve been working on for a while has way more workarounds than I would like and is as yet unfinished, (it is a consolidation of 3 existing apps into one). I will likely need to wait for fixes that are due in 2022R3 before I can even consider deploying a test version of the app for evaluation.
I have deployed a couple of small apps using Web 2 but they did not require recreating existing functionality that heavily depended upon styles, and Listbox functionality that has taken a couple years for Xojo to fix or implement. At present I still have a love hate relationship with Web 2. Some things are great and some things just weren’t/aren’t ready to actually successfully replace Web 1.0 yet. I still continue to try to make it work for me though despite the high frustration level since I have no real desire to switch development platforms.
I had quite a few Web 1.0 apps deployed, but for numerous reasons chose that rather than migrate to Web 2.0 to migrate to an alternative.
The learning curve wasn’t that much, but I put that down to previous experience with HTML, CSS and Javascript, which would have been needed for Web 2.0 anyway.
I’m happy with my web 2 project for now, but I struggled too much with the weblistbox and the datasource. so I made some websdk controls, among which a full bootstrap table with sql database connexion, which works completely as I want. I also made some other websdk controls to replace xojo web controls that were too buggy at the time, or not working like I wanted.
I also did not start a web 1 project, so did not have to struggle with web1-2 conversion that seems to discourage many users.
There are citizen developers around, even some chemists .
A web app does not need to look and work exactly like a desktop app. It should work and do so with sufficient speed, feeling responsive. I agree, Web 2 should do all the CSS and JS work behind the scenes, at least for basic controls.
I sometimes forget this is an international forum… Just to be clear when i say chemist, in the US that does not mean someone who works in a pharmacy as it means in England…
in the US it means:
a person who studies chemistry, or a scientist who works with chemicals or studies their reactions
… but don’t think "Breaking Bad’
The more things work like desktop the easier it is for someone like me to use and design without needing to spend a lot of time I don’t have to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to get things to work and look like how i want/need, as my “real job” is not coding.
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, it means the same:
a person who studies chemistry, or a scientist who works with chemicals or studies their reactions
The more things work like desktop the easier it is for someone like me to use and design without needing to spend a lot of time I don’t have to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to get things to work and look like how i want/need, as my “real job” is not coding.
That is Xojo’s appeal: providing cross-platform functionality that includes web apps. But from past experience I know that desktop apps and web apps will never be 100% on par.
What we realized was that people had come to expect web apps to function differently than desktop apps. That’s why one of the goals of web 2 was to make the apps look and feel like web apps rather than desktop apps.
Geoff I never had that expectation. I think it was a disservice to assume that all of your users had the expectation that a web app needed to look like a web app. I’m OK with that in the long run, but so much of the expected functionality that many of us came to rely on was discarded in the change to look more like a web app. Many of us liked being insulated from CSS and JavaScript as well as having almost identical syntax and functionality as Desktop. I’m still a cheerleader for Xojo, but I have been highly frustrated with Web 2 since it was released. Hopefully Ricardo can continue to fix the broken things and there can be some sorely needed stylistic tools introduced soon.
For in-house apps, where one has knowledge of exactly how something will be used and what classes of hardware will be used, looking like a web is not important.
Speed and cost of development, easy of deployment and end user productivity matter most. All else is (usually) secondary…
For apps for use by the general public it certainly matters more, just as desktop “prettiness” matters more.
However, if we take a -definitely not exhaustive- sample of corporate applications, say Wrike (project management), Harvest (time and expenses), Infinity (issue management, Mantis (bug tracking), they definitely look “web” as opposed to “desktop”. Corporate users increasingly expect that web look. I will go with the flow. If you can’t beat them, join them .
Since Web 1.0 is no longer supported and there is no guarantee that the next OS or browser update will make some Web 1.0 apps fail or require updating that doesn’t exist in a no longer supported version of Xojo I’m choosing to attempt to make Web 2.0 work for me.
We still wish to insulate most users from CSS and JavaScript. Those should be solutions only to uncommon problems. When we find users having to go to CSS and/or JavaScript to solve common problem, those are things we try to prioritize. Regarding look and feel, one thing we heard often about web 1 was that users couldn’t make it match the look and feel of their websites. Web 2 for the most part solved that problem.
I don’t dispute this in general, but not all corporations or corporate user bases are created equal. My users are primarily manufacturing users so typically older and used to desktop apps so the constancy with desktop apps in Web 1.0 was a plus. Web Apps that I encounter these days are often less intuitive and in many cases harder to use because they radically try to differentiate themselves from other apps, which I often find end up being poorly designed for usability. I expect that to mature somewhat in time, but going with the flow may not be the best functional design choice for meeting users experiential expectations or work patterns.
This was never a problem since none of my apps were customer facing. In fact none of the apps used and developed for internal use, regardless of the development team or development tools, were designed to look like our customer facing Web site. Corporate colors and an approved logo is about the only thing internal has in common with customer facing.
It was mostly people who wanted to make real websites, not Apps. My opinion is that you should have kept your focus on the concept. In the end, you spent a lot of time (years!) and money, dissatisfied customers and, it seems, less growth, when there is so much to do, when the concept worked well, it was clearly identifiable and was in a good dynamic, and the framework could have gained in features and new controls.
We certainly had people trying to create web sites by creating a web app but they are very different things so we have always tried to set expectations that Xojo is for building web apps, not web sites. There are other more appropriate tools available for building web sites.
“Should not” is not a guarantee. The more time that passes the less likely " contact us and we will do what we can do resolve the issue." will end in a resolution within the Web 1.0 framework. That is the reality. My original comment stated that there was no guarantee and that blog post does not indicate that there is a guarantee. It’s a promise to try to help only.
With the 20 or so existing web 1.0 apps I have being used in our manufacturing production, the commitment to try to help is a nice to have but it is not why I keep my Pro license current. Also despite my complaints, Web 2.0 is the direction Xojo needs to go and I support that, but I also insist that at a minimum it needs to be able to be equal the functionality and stylistically flexibility that Web 1.0 had. It should not take me months to duplicate a complex app because I keep running into issues that just did not exist in Web 1.0 so I totally understand why you aren’t switching yet @olivierV.
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