Hello,
I am a VB6 refugee, having been exiled from the Miro$oft
development camp by the assassination of VB6 - but I still
need to feed my family, and make GUI’s for scientific equipment.
all kidding aside, I have been using VB6 for 15 years now, and
I just came upon xojo. It seems to be the answer to my prayers.
I have a few questions:
will xojo allow me to use the .ocx’es that I have come to love?
for example, I use pro-essentials for graphing, and I don’t think
I can live without it. I also use a re size wizard, but I assume there
is a more modern version that everyone here used. Can I re-used
my antique, but useful re size wizard?
I use FTDI’s USB-232 chip ALLOT via the D2XX API. Can I still do
this?
–And this is a total bonus – Can I use the above API’s and OCX’es
and compile for Linux???
I wouldn’t worry about your resize wizard. Xojo is very good at resizing controls unlike vb6 where you had to code everything to resize.
No you won’t be able to use your activex controls and compile and it will work on all platforms. These are platform specific controls I.e. For ms. You could put your own together in xojo and use them cross platform but if you use any declares you will need to declare for each platform.
I came from vb6, you will find you can get apps up and running a lot faster in xojo.
By the way they are not ‘stupid beginner questions’. Always ask, you will find this forum does not shoot you down for asking the dumbest questions and there are some pros high up the food chain always willing to help.
Xojo does not have full COM support so your OCX’es that you’ve grown to love may, or may not work. I will go out on a limb and say probably not, but only some testing will tell for sure.
AFAIK OCX’s are Windows only and won’t work on other platforms. If you are doing cross platform apps you’ll have ditch them anyway so in the long run it may just be easier/better to do everything the Xojo way.
You can access DLLs or SO libs via Declares. As far as I know FTDI provides the means, so you can (Windows/Linux) write your Xojo interfaces to access those libs. Xojo, by now, is 32 bit only, so the 64 bit flavors are not the case by now. Xojo is free to “play around”, so give it a try, play with FTD2XX.DLL and libftd2xx.so a bit and see if you can get it working as you want.
[quote=115636:@Luigi Faustini]3) --And this is a total bonus – Can I use the above API’s and OCX’es
and compile for Linux???[/quote]
No. Unfortunately, the Windows API and OCX are specific to Windows.
About declares, it is fairly easy to adapt a declare from VB6 to Xojo. Just a manner to know the equivalent for variable types, which you can get help with here. For Windows API calls, check out the Windows Functionality Suite at https://github.com/arbp/WFS
I use it to move data - like a serial port - but the D2XX api ha a lot of advantages
over the “regular” serial ports - like the ability to put it into synchronous mode,
do weird baud rates, or use pins for bit-banging…
Can anyone suggest a similar package as this for graphing
on xojo ?? http://www.gigasoft.com/ Is there an obvious
way to make it work that I am missing?
[quote=115654:@Luigi Faustini]Can anyone suggest a similar package as this for graphing
on xojo ?? http://www.gigasoft.com/ Is there an obvious
way to make it work that I am missing?[/quote]
Try wrapping the C++ library up in a class. It will be Windows only but will be similar to what you have used.
Welcome Luigi.
You have made the right choice by joining the Xojo community!
People in this community go out of their way to help each other , which is something I have never seen (to this extent) anywhere else.
There is a variety of talent in the pool, covering all areas of speciality. I am sure that someone, somewhere here can help you with any questions you may have.
As far as the serial control via the FTDI chip, if wired properly the device will just show up as a traditional serial port. I do not even believe you will need the APIs. It’s been a while but if I remember correctly the FTDI devices I have used just use a default HID driver in Windows which makes the device appear as a RS323 serial COM port. Implementation is as easy as dragging and dropping the XOJO serial control to your window, setting the baud, etc. All the communications are up to you in code via the classes methods and events.
[quote=115654:@Luigi Faustini]Can anyone suggest a similar package as this for graphing
on xojo ?[/quote]
Firstly, welcome to Xojo. I’m a VB6 veteran myself (actually still supporting a few large VB6 projects), but Xojo is really a great programming language… especially when you come from a VB6 background.
I’ve created an example on how you can plot D3 charts in a Xojo Desktop application: How to plot D3
It uses the webkit html viewer and requires some JavaScript programming though. If you are looking for a pure Xojo charting option then Christian’s solution from MonkeyBread Software is a better solution.
I liked VB6 for more than 10 years, 1994-2004, and I always disliked .NET. As you work with Xojo you should not too much refer to the good old … since VB6 misses quite a lot of concepts which are implemented in Xojo. Sometimes I still have to do some maintenance on VBA, but since it’s not OO it’s feels as going back in time. Btw: from 1984 - 1992 I did assembler for different cpu’s . Still think that I could do more with 16K of memory than with 2GB today. Those were the days …
I believe the Xojo concept needs more publicity because growth is the best guarantee it will stay.
I have used every flavor of Basic from Microsoft since GWBasic, then QuickBasic, and VB 1 up to 4-ish. Then I discovered Real Basic become Xojo, and stayed with it since. Anyway I could not have developed for Mac with MS tools.
Welcome !