Hello,
Im building a desktop app in xojo, but i noticed that the controls provided in xojo web are more useful and prettier and have more options than the ones provided in desktop …, so i was wondering if its possible to build a web app in xojo and distribute it as desktop app, and what do you think are the challenges and drawbacks of using this approach…
Thank You
lol, not really, web controls haver very limited events.
Having the server app hosted somewhere, slow roundtrips to the server to react to some event, lack of client side code capacilities, etc.
PWA apps are not supported by xojo.
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Your question is interesting. Xojo doesn’t support the conversion of a Web app into a format that can operate as a Desktop app. However, this can be achieved, though it may not be practical for installations on multiple user systems.
The process would involve users installing the compiled Xojo Web app on their devices. Then, they can use their web browser to access it. To give it the feel of a Desktop app, you would need to provide them with a Xojo Desktop app. This Desktop app would contain an HTML viewer, functioning like a web browser, to display the web pages served by your Web app.
Unless there’s a compelling reason, I wouldn’t recommend this approach. It’s generally simpler to offer a Desktop app directly. Additionally, with Xojo, a Desktop app will be more native to the users’ systems and will utilize native controls.
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I think its a good idea to do this. The standardized Bootstrap library will give you true uniformity across platform. However, unless you develop a shell Desktop app with an HTML browser to run your main app, you will have to be contend with accessing it via a web browser. Which, to my opinion, is not bad at all considering the ubiquitous presence of web applications nowadays. Almost similar setup is also used by Electron apps i think. It uses web technologies to create desktop app.
Some of the limitation that you must consider is that web apps requires dedicated port to run in and it may not support the vast amount of events that a desktop app can handle.
But web apps are more pretty and visually attractive compared to desktop app. At least in Xojo world. And if you are developing an application for use in a networked environment, its definately more flexible compared to desktop app.
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I am working on the conversion of existing Web app in Xojo (2018 → 2023).
While desktop app is certainly more powerful the web app is certainly more portable as you can use it on any mobile device. Depending on the audience using the app it may actually make sense to forget about desktop app entirely and focus on web app solution. When dealing with legacy desktop app it is better to design/build complementary web app.
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Thank you all for your replies, your help is much appreciated.
@Brandon_Warlick very enlightening thank you very much,
another silly question would it be possible to run a web app without its web server capability 
That is a PWA, already anwered that… Not possible with xojo.
Actually a Web app can be run locally on a Windows PC as a service. You can actually create a Xojo desktop or console app to install the web app as a service on the PC desktop and it will run the same as it would on a server except I would not recommend letting other users access it remotely since it is not a server. Only the local user should access it.
However, I think a desktop app would be the better approach.
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Thank you for your reply and explanation