Xojo Plugin Crowd Funding Site

Just to clarify that is not my thinking, what I am thinking is that said developer puts up a solution price and people invest an amount, this doesnt change if the solution amount doesnt get reached. What could happen is that the developer could decide to accept the money raised or reject it and the investors get their money back and the project doesnt proceed. This way it makes it in the best interest for the investors to pay the most they can and for the developer to decide based on how busy they are, how much they want to do it etc to decide if they want to accept and lesser price.

Nathan,
I agree - that is a sensible way to approach the idea.

The only way to test this is to go ahead with a trial run. If nobody contributes, then we need to agree that the active Xojo community is too small for it to work.

If it does indeed work, and the control / add-on gets created, then alternatively, we know that there is a market for this type of venture :slight_smile:

Definitely in line with the various crowd funding sites where folks say “we need to raise this much money to get X done” and if it reaches that amount then the project goes ahead (usually)
And if not then it doesn’t (usually)

There is still the risk that the project fails for some non-financial related matters (which has happened on kickstarter etc)

This might even be a means to grow the market beyond the handful of third party developers
Say Brad has some great idea for a control and posts a “kick starter” proposal - then anyone who wants that control might kick in 5, 10 or 20 and IF the funding manages to reach the level Brad set then he can know the funding is already there to do this.
He doesn’t have to go and spend a TON of time working on the thing only to find that people are adverse to even buying it.

THis might be an excellent way to spur existing & new third parties on

Can the existing kickstarter website be used for this? It’s already in place so no one would have to re create the wheel. You could post links to kickstarter projects right here in the forum.

[quote=84355:@Norman Palardy]Say Brad has some great idea for a control and posts a “kick starter” proposal - then anyone who wants that control might kick in 5, 10 or 20 and IF the funding manages to reach the level Brad set then he can know the funding is already there to do this.
[/quote]

Any of us could certainly do this with Indiegogo today. Not Kickstarter though…

Indiegogo is a possibility, have done projects with client before using this. My vision is far more than that though in that it would provide a way for the developer to sell the plugin after the event and I am sure we could get some help from Xojo to raise awareness of a dedicated Xojo specific site. Also their needs to be a way for people to specify their requirements and create a spec that is locked once a developer taken on the project. The spec would form part of the KPIs etc. It will also need a lot more to make it really work and get used. The other thing that needs to be kept in mind is that because the site / company will be holding monies (in Paypal) on behalf of other people (the sponsors) then it could fall foul of requiring a banking license or at a minimum need to be a regulated entity. These are all things that can be overcome but it is not as simple as just built a site and hope it works and would need both time and some investment to make it happen. Maybe Geoff would be interested in discussing the idea of funding and / or some resources to help move things forward or maybe a 5 year Xojo upgrade license for free for the first 5 developers to joint and be part of the creation team. This would be win-win for Xojo Inc and would not actually cost them any real money. I am sure I can come up with other ideas and I am sure that others can as well if this was thought to be worth the effort etc.

Some random thoughts on the topic.

As far as money goes, once the project is established, couldn’t you then push it over to KickStarter?

There seems to be a certain level of skepticism in the community regarding third party code. It can range from misgivings about whether the offering will actually perform to whether there will be continued support.

Once the plugin or what have you is created, the creator is stuck with supporting it. That can suck all the profits out in a hurry.

Maybe this is the way to get an open source project off the ground. There are always only 2 or 3 people really contributing to any given open source project, so if a bunch of the bystanders kicked in some funds, the real contributors would have a reason to work on it. I’m just mercenary enough to be willing to contribute to a project if you make it worth my while, at least for the initial development.

I have no problem if someone posts a wish on the forums and if a couple of people say it’ll be worth some money, I spend a few days getting it working and add it to my plugin suite.

I would really like ABRP to be successful. Please let me know when it spins back up? Plus I am a short drive from GA.

Thanks!

[quote=84355:@Norman Palardy]Definitely in line with the various crowd funding sites where folks say “we need to raise this much money to get X done” and if it reaches that amount then the project goes ahead (usually)
And if not then it doesn’t (usually)

There is still the risk that the project fails for some non-financial related matters (which has happened on kickstarter etc)

This might even be a means to grow the market beyond the handful of third party developers
Say Brad has some great idea for a control and posts a “kick starter” proposal - then anyone who wants that control might kick in 5, 10 or 20 and IF the funding manages to reach the level Brad set then he can know the funding is already there to do this.
He doesn’t have to go and spend a TON of time working on the thing only to find that people are adverse to even buying it.

THis might be an excellent way to spur existing & new third parties on[/quote]

True Norman. I use http://www.designcrowd.com/ for my graphics and have been very pleased with the Quality. After all you set the bid pricing.

[quote=84412:@Tim Hare]There seems to be a certain level of skepticism in the community regarding third party code. It can range from misgivings about whether the offering will actually perform to whether there will be continued support.

Once the plugin or what have you is created, the creator is stuck with supporting it. That can suck all the profits out in a hurry.[/quote]

Tim, I find this to be a really weird view of the Xojo community as other platforms especially in the CMS marketplace welcome the development of add-ons and make a living from doing so. You say that the “creator is stuck supporting it”, you are looking at this the wrong way I would suggest in that the developer would only offer to write something if they believed that they would be able to sell the plugin after it had been created. This is no different from the developer coming up with an idea and writing it and then trying to sell it, the one big advantage is that the developer will have people paying for it before he even starts developing anything so can offset at least some of his costs.

With regard to your “continued support” comment, I refer back to other platforms that work very well doing exactly this type of thing.l

I think you’re discovering some of the quirks of the Xojo community. Maybe it’s just not big enough to achieve the critical mass necessary for a vibrant third party market. Hopefully, as it grows (like it is now) we’ll get there.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea. It’s just that there are some big barriers to entry. It’s devilishly hard to create a Xojo plugin. I suspect it’s a lot easier in your other environments. Now WE is a different animal. The Web SDK is a lot more accessible.

Writing a single platform plugin isn’t so hard - writing the x-platform one is since you need to know the three OS sdks

This is a bit of a chicken and egg because to grow the community you need to bring in fresh blood who believe they can build something amazing quickly and without having to spend years learning. If they can build something ready cool by using plugins to speed things up then the Xojo users / community will have no choice but to grow.

I am not sure that I really agree with you on this (its been a long day so sorry if that causes offense) but the Plugin documentation is probably between 100 and 200 pages long whereas if you want to try an learn .NET you are looking at tomes that start at over 1000 pages. If you are a reasonable C++ developer then I am sure that you can get your head around it and have a “hello world” plugin within a few days or less. It appears that the Xojo community have almost created plugins to be some form of black art which I just cant believe is really the case. Whats more once you start to get everyday programmers seeing that they can make money building plugins from places in the world that have lower costs of living then you will start to see plugins being developed for less and with a larger volume of resources. This then creates a far more dynamic and marketplace environment where the good seasoned plugin developers will stand ahead of others whilst the more run of the mill stuff will be available from the new breed of developers.

Norman, I want to put a bit of reality check onto your post and this “fear factor” related to Xojo plugins. The developers I have used for years in India were tasked by me (about 9 years ago) on behalf of a client to reverse engineer the software within a car CD player and add code to the operating system to interface with a GPS tracking device that would be located within the unit. The guys in India were sent one of the units and give a month to come up with a prototype. Within 3 weeks they had worked out the chip set used, the processor and extracted what they needed to put together a spec of what and how they would do it. This was from a standing start having never seen the device or processor etc before.

These Indian guys are good but at the core they are programmers who do general Windows / Mac programming, they are not rocket scientists. What I am trying to show is that with a desire and the right incentive programmers can do great things and the Xojo plugin SDK cannot be that complex, if it was then I dont believe we would have plugins like we have from the likes of MBS et al (no disrespect to Christian meant by this statement or any other Xojo plugin developers) and I really cant believe that the Xojo Inc engineers would go out of their way to make a plugin framework that requires a degree in brain surgery to get started.

To be fair, it’s been awhile since I looked at the SDK. The problem at the time was that those 200 pages of documentation should have been a lot longer. Or at least a lot clearer. Maybe it has improved enough to be usable. And, no, the Xojo engineers wouldn’t go out of their way to make it difficult, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve gone out of their way to make it easy, either.

Yes it is a chicken and egg situation, and that’s where your ideas have a lot of merit. I don’t want to be a naysayer. With sufficient incentive, as you say, it’s a problem that is solvable. The history of these types of efforts has not been good, but we shouldn’t be bound by history. The community is growing (at least the forums show a lot of new faces) so we should keep trying.

Anyway, the first example hasn’t been put forward yet, so it’s hard to evaluate how it’s going to work. I do like the idea, though.

Sadly I dont think it is one of those things that can be done with a “toe in the water” approach and it either has to be an all or nothing otherwise the community (in effect the early adopters) wont buy in and if they dont then it makes it much harder to get others to get involved. Also I really do feel it needs to have some support / push from Xojo Inc and I am not sure if Geoff et al are up for this or not.

I am currently in discussions with someone about the idea and need to see what happens in the next few weeks. If at that point it is decided to go to the next stage then I would propose putting together a very broad brain dump of bullet points to get a view from the community as to how it would work etc. From that a design spec would be put together with incentive ideas and thoughts on how it needs to be developed etc. Beyond that I am not thinking too much about because we need to get to that point first otherwise it will not see the light of day.

I have already registered a domain name, just in case and also have another name but am not sure if I would be able to use it at this stage.

I guess one of the first questions that will need to be considered “is Xojo robust enough / scalable enough to cope with this type of website?”

Kind of a side topic at this point…but the three issues you list cannot be solved by plugins. A plugin control can offer client side processing options for some of its events. But the framework in general sends events back to the server so that you can write handlers in Xojo and not JavaScript.

The need for short delays in places could be improved, but it would have to be improved in the framework.

As for offline web apps I don’t believe this would ever be possible with Xojo. At least it wouldn’t look anything like the current Xojo Web. You could use a console or web app (via HandleSpecialURL) to provide back end data, but otherwise an offline web app would need to be written in HTML / CSS / JavaScript and would not make use of the web framework at all.

I’m kind of in the same boat as a few others here: why can’t this be done now? If you have the funds and wish to see a plugin developed there are multiple plugin authors (myself included) you could contact. If you think the project needs crowd sourcing there’s multiple sites that do this now. Post some specific requests and see what happens.

As I have said already this post was not meant for me to get something written but to see what the views were of the community etc as other platforms have a marketplace type of environment whereas Xojo feels very much a closed “elite” type environment when it comes to plugins etc (I am not saying this about the community just the plugin concept). I dont think this is anything to do with people wanting to make it feel like a locked environment but simply the way it has evolved whereas other platforms have grown up embracing marketplace type development.

Commenting specifically on this point, I dont have an issue with the events being sent back to the server it is just that their are things that should be handled at the client end by something like javascript. For example it would be great if you could have events appear on different web controls that are client side events where you could embed a return for example that contained the javascript that you want to run client side. This way the client side script would be run and the server side event if it existed. My understanding is that this could be done either with a plugin or a “super” in the same way that StudioStable add a “Prepare to Show” event type.

[quote=84525:@Nathan Wright]As I have said already this post was not meant for me to get something written but to see what the views were of the community etc as other platforms have a marketplace type of environment whereas Xojo feels very much a closed “elite” type environment when it comes to plugins etc (I am not saying this about the community just the plugin concept). I dont think this is anything to do with people wanting to make it feel like a locked environment but simply the way it has evolved whereas other platforms have grown up embracing marketplace type development.
[/quote]

I would guess it has evolved this way due to market size. No doubt needing to know three OSes for desktop plugins plays a part.

If you just want to attach JavaScript to control events you can make that happen now though it is possible to break Xojo framework behavior when doing so. One of the big issues is synchronizing any changes in client side state to the server side representations. You can run into other issues.

If you want to be able to do this in a consistent and reliable fashion with an official API then I believe this is something Xojo would have to address.

I have sub classed and extended specific Xojo web controls to add features. But I’ve been hesitant to do something like adding methods to attach generic JavaScript to generic control events. Too easy to blow things up and then I have an upset customer, or worse Xojo has a Feedback report that has nothing to do with them.

MeteorJS handles this by queuing changes and pushes them in intervals. It happens to a be quick interval but the result is the same. Meteor is intelligent enough that the client makes decisions and then asks the server to verify. So the experience for the end user is always quick and clean. If the server decides a change is improper then it instructs the client to revert the change.

This is an example where WE could be leading the pack.