I hope this post doesn’t get viewed as negativity and gets deleted since this is a honest question and perhaps I can find a reason to stick with Xojo Web. I have been seriously considering other tools for my web development but I have been trying (for months now) to find reasons to stick to Xojo Web. This has been hard as Web 2.0 bugs and missing features (compared to Web 1.0 and other tools) are constantly tempting me to look elsewhere for an alterantive.
I have to admit I do have a very simple (UI wise) Web 2.0 deployed but I would like to know if someone else has actually used Web 2.0 for production web apps?
Hi Hector,
If your UI is simple, and the tools available in Xojo Web 2.0 will get the job done, then it’s hard to make an argument to try learning a whole other toolset. At this very moment I’m finishing a Web 2.0 commercial application - and I’m glad I did it on Xojo. I’m comfortable with the language spec and have years of working with the Xojo workflows I’m accustomed to. It may not be perfect (yet) but for me it’s getting the job done. Hope that’s helpful!
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I am sticking to Xojo web at least for a couple years. At least with my 2018r3 release, the improvent of web was so neglegible that I was not tempted to purchase another pro license. After that, the api 2 fiasco, the web 2 many bugs, performace problems, lack of events, lack of control sets and the weeks needed to rewrite a web 1 app…
Im sorry, I dont see an answer for your question, I also cant find a good reason to use web 2 beyond of using it in the same app as a new feature like URLConnection or PDF. But even then, I use a Desktop app as a helper to make the URLConnection calls so…
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It is nice to read that someone has been able to use it succesfuly for his needs. What I find troubling is that when things go just a bit over “simple” is when it loses it’s appeal.
So we basically share the same view. Thanks for your input.
I will not use Web 2.0 for the simple reason that it is far easier and quicker for me open up a CSS style sheet or HTML template and make the changes I need, rather than jump through the hoops I see going on here. Even the weekend worriers don’t have much trouble getting to grips with PHP, so the barrier to entry is low.
I still use XOJO for some console apps and a desktop app to capture, scrub and analyze the data for my website. But I will not upgrade my license again until there is something I need.
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As always, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Of course only “native” has all the bells and whistles. That’s true for all platforms. Any every platform is easy enough to learn if you have some programming experience, but it takes time to master it, and perhaps even a lot of time. It is true, that with Xojo web 2 it is good to have some CSS knowledge/understanding, and that it still has bugs (and missing features), its deployment is straightforward. That’s probably very(!) helpful for many! I’m not talking about a bit of PHP or Javascript, but if one wants to move to node.js or some python based frameworks, you need to have a good understanding of how to set up and maintain your server.
If you have the need to deploy an Intranet to your customers. Well, run the app as a Windows Service, and you are done. Is it the right tool to deploy your next webshop, if you want to scale it beyond a handful of customers an hour? Probably ( I would even say: definitely) not. Could it be useful to design quickly a first prototype, which in the case of a success story could be ported to a different platform? Yes.
If you have a large team, where many people are accountable for one topic: server, UI design, backend logic, frontend logic, other tools might be better, but for a one-man shop, especially, if you are perhaps not too well-skilled in terms of security aspects, I see Xojo Web 2 as a good foundation to get one up and running in no time. Often people are hunting for the best possible too, instead of just getting things done. The whole idea behind Xojo for me is to get things done.
But yes, I only have xojodocs.com publicly released, all my other solutions are customer solutions behind a login or intranet solutions. And they all follow more or less the same logic: displaying dashboards, creating pdfs and Excel sheets for the end-user from data in their databases etc. For these tasks I’m by far faster with Xojo Web, than I would with any alternatives (and I’m using those, but for different purposes, like commercial websites).
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I sell a Web 2.0 based mill planning application that interfaces with legacy ERP systems - I had to use Grafftisuite for the calendar I needed to facilitate drag dropping of mill jobs. I have sold 3 of these systems so far and am working on new functionality for delivery to a fourth customer (all are timber merchants in the U.K.).
In terms of issues - I had some strange issues with the date selection tool appearing in strange locations on screen but that seems to have gone away in the latest releases.
No memory leak issues, no speed issues and it’s looks like a modern web application.
More than happy here.
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Same here, the only thing which “bothers” me is the upload functionality (but Graffiti Suite helps on this one) and some localization FC, which seem to be fixed but not yet deployed. I would definitely not have been so fast to realize anything comparable with any other platform I know. Can I change each and every pixel? Nope. Do I want to be able to do so? Yes? Is it business-critical for my customers and my business not to be able to do that? Most likely the contrary :-). My customers want things to look modern and to work - the focus is on functionality. On a side note: not a single customer has been complaining about missing “responsiveness”. They either “scroll” on a mobile device, or are anyways using a tablet.
Did I ever miss the former styles? Not a second, but I have never been a fan of those either.
For me, the beauty lies in the ease to re-use code and having an easy-to-maintain dev and prod environment and handy deployment.
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I think the no memory leaks issue applies to Windows platform based webserver right? I have deployed one big Web 2.0 app without memory leak issue on Windows. Better and snappier performance compared to Web 1.0. No problem accesing and using via pc and mobile phone browsers. But i think running on Linux the memory leak issue exists.
Another one of my application of Web 2.0 seems to have some problem when running in phone based browser. Still investigating the problem.
In general, acceptable and much better compared to Web 1.0.
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Mine are deployed on Windows Server platform as standalones.
2 on Windows Server, the rest is running on Linux, but even there I don’t yet see a leak …
I honestly don’t understand how you don’t have memory issues since it involves JSON. As greg said all communication with the browser is handled this way … Even just launching ExecuteJavaScript leaks memory …
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My apps use Json extensively - my memory usage has not increased at all. Is it something specific when using json that causes the issue?
From Christian’s 64456 feedback, the memory leak is directly related to the ToString conversion method. But I am not so sure that the problem is only there. If you launch the project I had linked in the other post (now available here), you’ll see that the number of objects keeps growing and is never freed. The memory leak affects both JSON/Dictionaries/Call js etc.
I can’t tell if after calling ExecuteJavaScript the framework uses ToString, but I don’t think so…
Obviously I’m talking about the latest version 2021r.1.1.
JSON is not reliably disposing memory. <https://xojo.com/issue/64456>
I didn’t say that I do understand it, I am only surprised not to see the memory consumption on my Linux boxes 
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Don’t worry, I was just amazed at the various responses not just yours. Probably in your case the loss is so minimal that you don’t notice it.
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Just not to go off-topic, I converted my project to web 2.0 too. A lot of my graphical controls though rely on external javascript libraries (i.e. tables, graphs, numeric input etc). Thanks to this I haven’t found many bugs that I’ve seen on the forum (except for the memory bug). On the other hand I’ve found many others in the IDE, but they don’t cause so much damage. In all for now I have 13 cases of feedback of which 9 reproducible that I hope will be fixed soon. The only really annoying thing is loading the project in the Xojo Project format. If you have many webpages/webcontainers/webviews it takes more than 2/3 minutes to open.
Hey Hector!,
Web 2.0 has improved a lot since its debut, specially since 2021 1.1. It still has a long road ahead, there are some flickers here and there, styling needs to improve, etc… but as of today, I think it’s totally usable. I’ve started to enjoy it.
As other people said, Xojo Web may not be yet my first choice if I want to create the next Twitter. However, I think it has its use cases, like internal tools, intranets, robotics, home automation, ERPs and so on.
Anyway, give it a try 
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