Standalone Desktop App Deployment

Hi there, I’m an Italian developer and I’ve just joined this forum because I’m interested in developing cross platform application with Xojo.

First of all, what do you think about this program. Is it powerful enough? Is it a valid alternative to Qt and/or Xamarin?

However, I’ve installed Xojo on my Mac and created a simple desktop application to see how it works. Then I built the app for all the platforms available (OS X, Windows and Linux). Now, the Mac app is a simple .app file which contain all the extra files inside, but the Linux and Windows apps are correlated with some extra files and folders. So, is there a way to create a standalone desktop application for each platform, without the additional libraries?

Thanks in advance. Bye.

No Grabiele,

on Windows a single exe file was available in earlier versions but this changed so now you get an exe and a folder with the required dlls.
There are some utilities for creating a single executable (for example Enigma VirtualBox and it’s free http://www.enigmaprotector.com) if you really need to do it.

Speaking about what it is best: just try it (you can do it free).
There so many factors to take into account : programming language, previous knowledges, kind of applications that you need to develop and so on.
The language it’s simple to master when compared, for example, to C++ but this it’s not the only factor.
At this level the frameworks are big and maybe not so simple to compare.

Speaking about supported platform Xojo has one more platform: web applications.
Maybe for you this can make a difference.

Saluti.

Grazie Maurizio,

I’ve developed a lot of applications in VB.NET with Visual Studio, so this might be a powerful and more simple program for me.
At the moment, I’m not interested in mobile programming and web application capability it’s a good additional feature.
Simply I want a program that allows me to code only once and reuse the same code (or almost the same with only small changes through different platforms).
But I’m also interested in learning a more powerful programming language like C# or C++.

[quote=66174:@Gabriele Pacaccio]
Simply I want a program that allows me to code only once and reuse the same code (or almost the same with only small changes through different platforms).[/quote]

This, by far, is the best reason to use Xojo. It (like any dev environment) has its warts and unpolished pieces, but the cross-platform native compilation has been the clincher for me for the last 10+ years.

If you don’t mind I’ll jump in on this line you wrote:

I’m a C# programmer and a Xojo programmer (Xojo only in free time, for myself). But I think it’s necessary to overthink what ‘a more powerful programming language’ means.
Maybe C# and C++ are faster than Xojo, but does that mean that they are more powerful? In normal programming, when making desktop apps, that difference of a few microseconds won’t be noticed by you or your users.
The fact that you develop for 3/4 platforms instead of one, will be noticed by you (more revenues) and your users (e.g. Linux users appreciate your work more, because you don’t let them behind)

And ofcourse, you can use Mono for C#, but porting them to native Mac/Linux will be substantially more work than with Xojo.

If you want to build CPU intensive task where milliseconds count, go for C++, but that is only a small percentage of the apps around.

I’ve tried it and you are right, Xojo is better. Also Qt is more complicated and Qt creator has a very poor IDE for application UI design.
I’ve just found out Xojo today and I like it very much.
Thanks for the explanations.

I’ve developed a web app just to see how it works. I’ve compiled it in Linux Stand Alone mode and uploaded the entire app folder into the server. I’m using a free hosting service and it doesn’t allow me to access via ssh, so is there another way to make the application working?

I doubt it. You really need SSH in order to get a standalone web app running. There is a slim chance that a CGI app might work, but I don’t expect a free hosting service is going to be configured to allow it, nor allow you to change the configuration.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Xojo Cloud (coming soon!) are your best bets.