Would like some pointers for Xojo

Question

My company is planning to build a simulation tool for processing (beverage) and we're currently looking at a half-baked system written in Xojo. I had personally never heard of this language and would appreciate it if anyone could give a quick assessment.

We have no in-house Xojo competence at all and are of course reluctant to bring in a system that would require a big investment in know-how for just one system.

So, we're now looking at our options: Port it to a language we're good at (C# or Java) or continue development in Xojo while building internal skills for the language.

So, what are the big pro's and con's with Xojo?

Cheers

Answer 1

Xojo has been around since the late 1990s, then named RealBasic. Its strength lies in its ability to make native looking and behaving apps for many platforms, mainly OS X but also Win and even Linux. The dev community is fairly small, though. But the company managed to stay in business all this time and isn't looking to end it any time soon.

The language is fairly simple and easy to learn, using long known concepts (its design was based on Visual Basic).

Knowing Java, it should be easy to grasp the language. The bigger hurdle is probably getting familiar with its libary. Many things are much simpler to accomplish in Xojo vs Java, though.

Call me lazy, but that's what I like about Xojo. I also program ObjC in Xcode, but for those little tools that just need to work quickly, Xojo is superior for whipping out a program quickly that that has a decent UI and works on many platforms with little to no tweaks.

If you need x-platform support, give it a try, for sure. If you only need the app to run on a single platform, and if you have skills with other dev systems, I'd advise against starting out with Xojo, to avoid the risks you get when going with such a small company that's offering closed-source software.

In your particular case where you have already a half-working solution, I suggest you take a few days to familiarize yourself to get a feeling for it (you can use Xojo for free as long as you don't build standalone apps with it). It's overall fairly stable and I'm still using a 3-year old version most of the time to develop and build my apps. So, even if Xojo should go out of business suddenly, I'd not be too worried. As long as you stick with the simple functionality (e.g. not use unique features such as XojoScript), you can still convert the app to another language later, but there's also a fair chance you never have to.