Published on October 9, 2019.

It's been exactly 9 months to the day that I wrote "Xojo in 2019: What I'm Looking Forward To." At the time, I honestly expected that everything mentioned in that post would be available this year. Some of the features that I listed in that post had been "in the works" for what had seemed like a very long time. It just seemed logical that most, if not all, of those features would be available as part of Xojo's 2019 releases.

Xojo 2019 R2

This morning Xojo released Xojo 2019 R2. The primary change in this release is API 2.0. In my post from January, I described API 2.0 as an "attempt to modernize Xojo." I think it's also an attempt to standardize the language and make it a little easier for newcomers to learn.

To some extent, I think Xojo has done that. But it's come at a cost. We now have legacy code that needs to be carefully examined and in many cases modified in order to run properly. I think API 2.0 is a step in the right direction, and that its benefits will become more clear over time. But for now, there's really not much benefit in using it, at least not for me and the type of work that I'm doing these days.

But what about the other features that I mentioned in that post from January? Android Support. Interops. Xojo-based plugins. The new IDE. Web Framework 2.0. They're nowhere to be found in Xojo 2019 R2.

The Roadmap

In July, Xojo posted a development roadmap. It lists everything that the Xojo team is either currently working on or planning to implement at some point. The list is helpful in that it shows the order of importance for the upcoming features. However, there are no timeframes associated with the features - not even rough estimates.

A Difficult Goal, and A Difficult Decision

Over the past 9 months, I’ve begun to think that Xojo's goal of being a rapid application development platform, that can be used to develop native desktop, mobile, Web, and console apps, and can compile to multiple targets (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Web, and eventually Android) is simply too ambitious.

It would be a challenge for a large, well funded, and well staffed development company to achieve that goal. So it seems to be a particularly difficult goal for Xojo, which is a small development company. And regardless of how insanely talented and dedicated the Xojo team is (and they are, by the way), it seems that they're facing the difficult task of trying to hit an ever-moving target.

Shortly after returning from XDC 2019 in early May, I made the difficult decision to switch from Xojo, which at the time was my primary development platform, to PHP. I did so because of what I learned at XDC, which was that Xojo's new Web framework was still far from being ready.

I'm still rooting for Xojo, and I want to see them succeed. I want to see Xojo get to a point where it makes sense for me to give it another go - and I'll happily do that if and when it reaches that point. But until then, I've had to move on.