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Living with Xojo

Xojo is a fantastic, integrated development environment. With it, you can do multi-platform software development. I think there is no faster way to go from an idea to a running prototype. For MacOS, iOS, Windows, Android, WebApps. It can do it all.

Xojo as an organization, itself has learned to develop fast. Something they have been struggling with in the past.

The disadvantage of the focus of Xojo on continuous improvement with a relatively small organization causes some challenges in the users development process. Frequently it is impossible to finish a project after upgrading to a newer IDE version without redoing major parts of the code.

Xojo when it starts up, gives a nice Recent Projects menu, where you can select a project you are working on and want to continue to work on. It does not separate in what version of Xojo you work on for what project, however. So if you have to maintain production code in an older version, the only save way too work is to have separate machines for that.

I've learned the hard way NOT to install the newest update of Xojo on my Mac. So that I don't open project files with the newest version. Start working on it and get stuck after routinely saving the project with changes, and later in the production environment find that there are bugs to deal with. Bugs, by the way, can also be improvements what make old version code incompatible.

There are three ways to deal with this flaw in the Xojo IDE:

  • To have separate machines for code in production maintenance and new code.
  • To finish projects with the existing IDE version and schedule (when time is available) IDE maintenance to update to a newer version.
  • Use Xojo only for prototyping and do the final build in a dedicated (Mac/Windows/iOS/Android/Web)App development IDE.


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