[quote=249740:@Bob Keeney]And sadly, Xojo still seems to be focused on marketing to hobbyists. You look at how much Xamarin charges and who they sell to and you wonder what Xojo is doing wrong. I suspect it’s who they are focusing on.
My Xojo vs Xamarin blog post has been, by far, the most widely read post on my blog. Ever. Not even close. And yet I don’t believe that Xojo has ever tried to encourage that comparison or actively worked to compare themselves to Xamarin, or any other tool for that matter.[/quote]
I think this is the problem with Xojo in competing - Xamarin “Ship cutting-edge apps with same-day support for new OS releases.” They know what needed to be included immediately.
[quote=249736:@Sam Rowlands]
Apple does seem to slowly moving this way, certain types of apps can only be built using their language and tools (Photos extension as an example).[/quote]
I think this is more that certain types of “apps” have to be subclasses of specific classes in Cocoa
Screensavers likely fall into this category as well
IF the tool could create the correct subclass then it would probably just work
I am not Xojo bashing, I sit here with a full MS dev kit coding all day and I recognise that Xojo does some things more easily and more quickly and so I use it. I am sure that the Xamarin acquisition will take MS right into the heart of x-platform but it will take some time before it is truly as easy and stable as I (and probably others) would like it to be. I have hopes that Swift will also play a bigger part and maybe one day it will be a supported language in Visual Studio.
I have no problems with the Basic language, Xojo’s flavour has a lot in common with C# and if it had a few more braces and semicolons you would be hard pushed to differentiate simple code. As pointed out by Brock, it is those extra language features such as generics and lambdas that improve productivity but I have been surprised by what can be done with Xojo, reflection is a good example as it is nearly as good as .NET. If you look at computer languages today there are hundreds, every new area of computer application seems to ‘need’ a new language and so chasing many language features seems pointless (but a few new features would be nice). I think Xojo should be building better extensions, components and frameworks to go with what they already have. It is annoying that I have to struggle with the included simple toolbar when there is such a nice toolbar in the IDE. It is annoying that I feel I have to purchase 3rd party additions (sorry 3rd party vendors) for sourcelist, statusbar, splitter etc. And with Visual Studio I can point to a database and get it to generate classes for CRUD or point to a SOAP service and now a REST service and generate classes to communicate and wrap the data but with Xojo I have to work with SQL and sockets + dictionaries.
Everyone wants to do x-platform and that is one reason why web applications have progressed so much and now native desktop + mobile x-platform app development is progressing faster too, the Xamarin announcement is one clear sign of the that. There is no need to defend Xojo and no need to deny that others such as MS will have greater success in x-platform. I just wonder what MS are going to charge for it, if they really want the mobile app developers to come over to Visual Studio then it will be need to be free or very cheap and then the uptake could be huge.
[quote=249765:@Björn Eiríksson]The answer to that is very simple, over the last 18 years or so then its always the same story. You start telling them about it its xplaform and sort of cool in this and that way. They ask what language is behind it, you tell them its sort of basic dialect then there is short silence (at that point they stamp it as a bit of a toy) then you talk more of but you just press compile for the other platforms and even if reluctant their still interested to see more though not happy, then if you make it that far and show them the IDE then thats where it ends, every time. All interest is gone. The code editor number 1, 2 and 3 kills it. Sluggish IDE number 4 and 5. (especially if you make the mistake to show it on Windows).
[/quote]
Sure Xojo descended from BASIC, but it is not what most people think of when they think BASIC… Still isn’t VB.net reasonably popular? VB 6 seemed to be from everything I’ve read about it here and again from I read that was a less capable/advanced language than Xojo.
Yes the IDE (but don’t get me started on the navigator) IS geared towards someone that does not code in Xojo all day every day. Then the structure/organization it imposes IMO increases productivity.
I have been using the product for something like 14 years… I will go stretches where I will spend hours coding 4-6 days a weeks for several weeks and then go several weeks without coding anything. Even when I am in the middle of an intensive coding period I find the structure of the IDE useful… It really helps me stay organized…
But granted I don’t make my living coding and I am not a fast typist. Also it would so much harder FOR me to start coding with just a blank screen never mind stay organized.
I would have no problem is they created a “pro” level editor, and I would be fine if that was only included in the “Pro” edition, as long as they kept up the regular one and did not cripple it… But we all know they likely don’t have the resources for that.
In the last several years Xojo inc has seemed to be going after the Pro market more , or at least pricing changes give that impression …
There are some people who’s brains just don’t process C style syntax efficiently… I am one of those. If Xojo ever went to C style syntax (And got rid of the structured IDE) I would see no reason to use it over the free environments.
I guess the question for Xojo Inc is should they try to go toe to toe with the “big boys” or carve out a (hopefully) profitable niche among those who’s brains rebel at C type syntax.
Indeed Xojo is not that far. Personally, I could take the semicolon. I used quite a bit the colon in VB. There are cases where it is nice to do a one liner. Before anybody comes to excommunicate that style, let me claim the freedom of style.
Look pretty clear it has been Xojo’s choice since the name change. Not so sure they had any other option if they wanted to remain independent, and not be gobbled up by some faceless sterile giant.
I have been following Microsoft for long enough to predict a dire destiny for Xamarin. At a time when MS is pushing its Windows 10 bridges as a solution to port code to iOS and Android, Xamarin appears much less like a new promising technology than a potential competition worth starving to death. I wish I was wrong, though. Only time will tell.
I read it differently: the bridges are to bring IOS (not android anymore, this bridge is now officially dead) to Windows Universal. Centennial is the bridge to bring win32 applications to the windows store (Universal).
Xamarin is on the other hand the tool to go from Windows to other platforms. As such, it seems to me that it is a very strategic acquisition and that it will not die, far from. In the past, Microsoft made other such acquisitions: Visio from Visio Corp. (Shapeware), ERP products such as Axapta and Navision. Both are still actively developed and sold under the Dynamics brand, and represent sizeable portions of Microsoft revenues in 2015. Microsoft is not always the evil acquisition killer. some are real strategic moves.
I think you would be foolish to discard Xamarin completely or assume Microsoft will destroy it. Miguel de Icaza has been fighting for .NET interoperability for over a decade. Microsoft has been salivating to bring him into the .NET framework teams for just as long.
.NET represents one of the largest collections of libraries, tools, components, and add-ons anywhere in our industry. Xamarin enables .NET apps to run the same code on almost every kind of device that .NET does not already natively support. You are talking about every imaginable component: LDAP, charting, PDF, compression, encryption, web servers, sockets, SSL, banking, Quickbooks, UI, 3 different ways to do UI, probably more than that, MVC, or no MVC, Functional programming with F#, VB.NET, Roslyn which allows you to compile code dynamically inside of your current app, AOT (ahead of time compiling) removing the garbage collector which .NET is bringing to desktop as well so the fat runtime is not needed, etc.
There is no task which cannot be completed in .NET. Sure the syntax of C# is not as friendly as basic derivatives like Xojo and the IDE is fat and overwhelming but between Visual Studio Code and a few Xamarin IDE’s this will be corrected very quickly.
Xojo should feel on notice that they need to really open up. It would be easy to create a Xojo IDE clone for .NET but it would be nearly impossible to bring all the collective of power of .NET to Xojo. That is a problem.
All that aside I still like Xojo because some apps are truly much easier to make in Xojo. All of those points aside I think the most damaging aspect of .NET compared to Xojo is: concurrency.
Async/Await and true threading capabilities completely annihilate the Xojo story of running helper apps and using IPC.
Phillip is right, .NET has a package management system of it’s own (as well as VS supporting others such as bower). It is similar to the Ruby Gems concept and a bit like the Apple App Store for .NET developers. Looking at the website (nuget.org) gives some interesting numbers.
Microsoft ASP.NET Razor, the main templating engine used for ASP.NET webpages: 14,406,686 total downloads.
Microsoft EntityFramework, the database access technology: 16,065,765 total downloads
jQuery, the same jQuery but packaged up for us .NET people: 18,860,015 total downloads
Newtonsoft Json.NET, a JSON framework for serialising/deserialising JSON data: 24,553,658 total downloads
NuGet claim to deliver around 45 million packages per month and even if you can find reasons to discard 75% of those as related dependencies, projects that don’t start etc. it is still huge and fantastic – and the majority of it (like Ruby Gems) is FREE.
Open source, open standards, open APIs and an extendible IDE have helped to drive these volumes up and taking it x-platform to Linux/MacOS/Smart Device will simply multiply the number of applications. It is the complete opposite of the ‘closed’ approach that even Microsoft had 10+ years ago.
It is more than just language, maybe you could call it a ‘mindset’
For those who are complaining about Xojo, please try Xamarin for a day or two to build some iOS app. Let me know what you think of the speed and issues you “may” encounter.
I have the latest iMac with full specs. On that iMac Xamarin is much slower than Xcode and Xojo. I have heard of build times ranging from 5-8 minutes (minutes not seconds) for large projects.
Xojo leaves much to be desired, but what it has works quite good (in my experience).
For my work I only program in .NET. .NET is indeed widely supported. But don’t forget that .NET is slow and you need an obfuscater tool when you don’t want your app to be open source. It’s easy to see the speed difference between an application made with a true native compiler (eg. Delphi) or one .NET app. I’m using a number of third party apps that, at one day, made a switch from Win32 to .NET. Funny thing is that they (the developer) all warned at advance that their app would be slower.
.NET is nice but true native compiled apps have an advantage. Imho …
to wrap this up… nothing really changed… MS now can claim to be better x-platform compatible (in just replacing the label, huh)
And 14 years absolutly say nothing… how long is Java among us? 20 years? They’ve had 20 years to become “the” x-platform enviroment? It is courious that this is not for me.
.NET is on my radar (esp. because I am former VB6 guy). Swift aswell and how it is growing in business (with the commitment of IBM).
Maybe not literally, but it at least sounds like that, eg.:
[quote=249740:@Bob Keeney]And sadly, Xojo still seems to be focused on marketing to hobbyists. You look at how much Xamarin charges and who they sell to and you wonder what Xojo is doing wrong. I suspect it’s who they are focusing on.
My Xojo vs Xamarin blog post has been, by far, the most widely read post on my blog. Ever. Not even close. And yet I don’t believe that Xojo has ever tried to encourage that comparison or actively worked to compare themselves to Xamarin, or any other tool for that matter.[/quote]
I only try to say that Xojo isn’t that bad compared to Xamarin, and that Xamarin is imho only suitable for those who know or love C#. If not one is better of with Xojo or Xcode.
