Ricardo
I’m sure your examples thus far are just fine for the level of developer you’re targeting. Unfortunately for noobs like me, however, this WebSDK is just too far above my pay grade. After taking a closer look at your examples, I expect to have more intelligent questions to ask you before I request another example.
If I could make a general suggestion which applies to almost all Xojo documentation and video presentations, however: Presuming you’re targeting the new Xojo user (which doesn’t seem to be the case with the WebSDK), emulate Geoff Perlman, who recently came out with the clearest and most readily understandable database videos ever created in Xojo’s history. Unlike the case of the WebSDK, I have a lot of experience with databases in general, yet I found Xojo database videos to be overly complex because they didn’t start at the beginning (absolute zero experience with the IDE) and work from there.
In his new videos, Geoff starts out presuming I’m an idiot (which is, in this case, an accurate supposition) and breaks everything down, displaying every step in the iDE, and when I finish I not only have a working prototype but a fairly thorough understanding of what I just did.
In the case of WebSDK, half the battle with a newcomer to Xojo is not just what to write but where to write it. For example, the first time I had to extend a class, it’s not like I couldn’t write that or understand it, but I didn’t know where to put the “extends” part. Writing it in the parameters box seemed counterintuitive. Ditto for the Namespaces. Not a new concept for me, but where do you declare the Namespace? Little things like this, that you experts assume we know, trip me up for days.
The first day of Xojo programming, I was trying to open a SQLite file, which I have done in PHP, Go, Node, Python and even Rust. Expecting to write a file path or URL, imagine my astonishment when the video’s author confronted me with a “SpecialFolder”, “FolderItem” and “Child”, suggesting I automatically migrate the file to another folder for some reason. Now, as it turns out, all these terms are extremely useful and the concept behind them is a core strength of Xojo in terms of its easy integration into the native file system, but I would argue this was not necessarily the place to start off with the new user–at least not without a good explanation.
Now, I could look all this stuff up–and obviously I did–but this is often a pattern in Xojo documentation. “Webstyle” is another concept I am constantly confronted with, yet is not given a lot of copy in the docs. Understanding your staffing constraints, I would just want all of you to give some more thought to this subject, knowing you’re all doing the best you can.
Thank you for your help and understanding,
fritz
